Rating: 2 Stars
The following review contains spoilers.
Overview:
A young woman named Suki has dissociative identity disorder, and has been undergoing an experimental treatment called “The Siamese Burn” to get rid of them. It’s basically electroshock therapy, with jumper cables hooking up to both of her ears. The machine that does it has a little analog counter of how many personalities she has remaining, and after each treatment it goes down one or two. When she’s got less than 10 left, she’s discharged from the hospital and sent to live in a halfway house for the mentally ill called Juniper Tower, along with a portable version of the Burn machine that she’s expected to keep using on herself. The Tower is occupied entirely by attractive women except for one guy named Hogan, who claims he filled out the paperwork wrong, and now considers himself a “rooster in the henhouse”.
Every couple days or so another woman jumps off the building to her death. As Suki has blackout periods after each use of the Burn, she fears she has something to do with it. One of her alters is called “The Scribbler”, and is characterized by refusing to speak and writing backwards all over the walls. Now she keeps writing “Killer” (or “relliK” I guess). The Burn machine is also getting worked on and modified during her blackouts, but to what end?
Eventually, Hogan decides to try the Burn on himself (why?) and is filled with joy, and begins floating around the room and glowing from the eyes. Suki is now down to two personalities, her and the Scribbler, and fears that she herself may be the alter and will be wiped away with the last Burn treatment. Hogan tells her to go for it, since he loved it, but she freaks out and leaves. She calls her doctor from a phone booth, and he comes to pick her up, and while in the car she randomly starts picking up confidential files he has on the floor and reading them. Here she learns that the escaped mental patient who’s been in the news is actually Alice, a woman at the Tower who has repeatedly pushed Suki down the stairs, and that Alice has a pattern of killing all of her boyfriend’s ex-lovers and then the boyfriend himself. Suki realizes that all the woman who jumped slept with Hogan, and that Hogan is next.
By the time Suki gets back to the Tower, Hogan has tried the Burn on Alice, hoping it would make her as happy as it made him, but it just makes her even more herself, but with super powers now. Suki runs for the Burn to bring out the Scribbler to fight her but it’s now destroyed. She taps into the Scribbler somehow anyway, and her and Alice have a super-powered fight on the roof in the rain. After Alice is almost strangled, she comes to her senses long enough to regret all the murders, and she jumps to her death.
All along there’s been a framing device of Suki being interrogated (somewhere in the Tower, not at the police station for some reason), and when there’s a distraction and she’s left alone, she uses her Scribbler superpowers to fly away, promising to help other mentally ill people wake up to their own hidden strengths or something. It’s hard to be sure exactly what her plan is because before she left she took the time to record a long monologue into the policeman’s tape recorder, and it’s one of those end-of-movie-monologues that’s supposed to sum up the whole theme of the movie but which I always find incomprehensible. Something about maybe all the sane people are really the crazy ones? I dunno.
Best Parts:
It’s only 90-minutes and it moves quickly. It’s never boring or tedious.
The Scribbler is packed wall-to-wall with people you will recognize from other things: Garret Dillahunt, Eliza Dushku, Michael Imperioli, Michelle Trachtenberg, Gina Gershon, Kunal Nayyar, and starring Katie Cassidy (who played the first Black Canary on Arrow) as Suki herself. And generally these people do a fine job with what they’re asked to do (well, Dushku and Nayyar are a little stiff). Only knowing Cassidy from Arrow, where let’s say she was not always the best part of the show, I was especially impressed with her performance.
Towards the end of the movie, Suki wakes up from a blackout in an alley in her underwear, and she steals a skeleton Halloween costume out of the back of a costume shop, wearing this the rest of the movie. I think it’s supposed to be a metaphor for seeing who she really is on the inside or whatever, but it’s also just a funny/ridiculous thing to become her (sort of) superhero outfit.
Worst Parts:
The plot doesn’t make a ton of sense. The first time we see Juniper Tower, someone has graffitied the sign to say “Jumper Tower”, and indeed a woman jumps to her death the moment Suki walks up to the front door. Then right away Suki meets a woman who says something like, “You’ll jump. They all do.” And then for the rest of the movie we’re supposed to worry that one of Suki’s alters is actually killing these women, even though it’s well-established that people have been jumping since long before she got there. And even the eventual reveal that Alice is doing it doesn’t quite make sense either, since it’s they say the escaped mental patient was a recent event, so it still doesn’t jive the with the Tower’s apparent long-history of jumpers.
Speaking of Alice, throughout the movie the doctors keep talking about “Patient 99” and how her treatment didn’t go as well as Suki’s and she’s “incurable”. And then when the main doctor finds out the escapee was “Patient 99” he gets really worried (also, why did he find out on the phone days later and not, like, when it happened?). The implication through all this is both that the identity of Patient 99 is important, since they never say her name until the end, and that some aspect of her treatment messed her up. And then we find out that it’s Alice, which is a fake name, and her real name is Veronica, so even if they had been saying “Veronica” all along, it wouldn’t have given away anything, and we also find out that she was admitted in the first place after committing a bunch of murders, so apparently whatever failed treatment isn’t to blame after all. It’s all real muddy.
The theme of the movie seems to be accepting mental illness and not trying to wipe out all the “individuals” for the sake of “conformity”. And that’s fine, I guess, but it would mean more coming from a movie that didn’t have such ridiculously over-the-top portrayals of mental illness. The first person we see after Suki is Cleo, who wears Egyptian make-up and carries a snake everywhere. We also meet a woman who refuses to take off her bunny ears, and another woman who is always totally nude, because she’s afraid of clothes. These are one-note jokes, not nuanced three-dimensional neurodiverse human beings.
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