Double Blind

The Plot: Claire (Millie Brady) signs up to a drug treatment trial in an underground facility, along with a number of other participants including Amir (Akshay Kumar) and Ray (Diarmuid Noyes). This is a double blind trial, meaning that neither the administrator Dr. Burke (Pollyanna McIntosh) nor the subjects know what the effects of the drug will be. As the subjects become sleep deprived, they discover what that side effect is: falling asleep means not waking up – ever again. Panic ensues and a lockdown occurs. Claire and her increasingly fraught subjects have to get out of there – somehow…

The Verdict: Someone has been studying their genre films and how to wring every bead of sweat, drop of blood and ounce of tension out of their scenario. Those someones are writer Darach McGarrigle and director Ian Hunt-Duffy, both making their feature debut with the niftily effective psychological horror Double Blind. On the evidence of this film alone, they won’t be languishing in the dark shadows for much longer. Low-budget Irish genre films that catch your attention have been a Hollywood calling card for several local talents. Lee Cronin and Ciaran Foy, for example, went on to work on sequels Evil Dead Rise and Sinister 2 respectively. One then has to wonder what might await this imaginative duo who have cooked up a pressure cooker of a film that achieves a lot with only a relatively basic narrative setup.

It’s a familiar setting for a psychological horror – a disparate group of characters gathered together for a short period of time in a confined space. Some will live, some will die – with one spectacular death coming fairly quickly into the proceedings. The characters are all there for reasons of their own, but the motivations of a shady-sounding pharmaceutical company remain uncertain. McGarrigle takes that genuinely frightening concept of ‘never sleep again’ from A Nightmare On Elm Street and then pulls and distorts it to see how it fits this particular scenario. We all have to sleep sometime. There’s no dream-stalking boogeyman here though, even with nightmarish visions of the dead occurring in the minds of the subjects. McGarrigle and Hunt-Duffy are more interested in exploring the idea of the subjects turning on each other, as paranoia grips hard and desperation grows to just get the hell out of there…

For the most part, Hunt-Duffy has succeeded in holding up to the promise of this tautly-calibrated premise. He treats the subject with the seriousness it requires, with only minimal comedic relief. The film opens with a lab rat contained with a box – a metaphor for what the human subjects will soon also face up to, with the audience along for this bumpy ride. He maintains that creeping sense of dread and constant momentum right up to the closing shot. Pacing is an important part of a horror film, so that it becomes more than just that. It becomes an experience, a vicarious thrill for the audience. He leans into that angle, pumped up by an atmospheric John Carpenter-style score from Irish composer Die Hexen. It’s a well-shot film too, making efficient use of its main location to drive its characters to the edge of sanity. Double Blind is clear in its vision about what it wants to achieve and it does so without any pretence. Sleep tight then for this nightmare fuel of a film.

Rating: 3.5 / 5

Review by Gareth O’Connor