BUFF | trailer
If you're into slow burning sci-fi, you'll probably dig THE CORRIDOR. If your sci-fi needs atomic gorillas, robots, and/or spaceships, this may feel molasses slow, altho some harsh violence in the final act does spice things up.
Five lifelong friends meet up for a weekend of male bonding at a cabin in the woods they usedta hang at when they were kids. Tensions are a bit high since this is the first they've all seen one another since Tyler was committed (now released on meds) after witnessing the suicide of his mother, which caused him to snap and attack his friends. When Tyler encounters a strange otherworldly phenomenon in the woods, he begins to doubt his sanity again. When he learns that his friends can also see and experience this corridor of energy, he's relieved, but then notices that their exposure to it affects their behavior. They begin to needle and provoke one another, and each time emotions run high, turning violent at times, the corridor... changes.
Yeah, weird, right? It's a quiet kind of psych-sci-fi tale. In tone and setup—the longtime friends reuniting for a weekend in the wild and encountering something not of this world—it reminds me of DREAMCATCHER. Of course, the nature of the otherworldly phenomenon is different.
I like the way the story goes, and the cast is very good, but I wish that some of the on screen execution was different. The director did explain that the edit that was screened was a version 1.0, and that there is more post production to complete before reaching a truly final cut, so maybe that will happen.
**SPOILERS** in more summary and commentary.
Tyler's mother encountered the corridor many years earlier, when it was tiny. Each human interaction with the corridor causes it to grow. Violence and death within the corridor seem to supercharge it. As it grows, it seems to direct its extension towards the nearest city.
Tyler's mother has been unbalanced for most of his life, and we discover that her behavior eventually drove him to assault her, a fact that Tyler had repressed thoroughly and only remembers under the influence of the corridor. When he and his friends enter the corridor, it connects them, forcing and/or allowing them to share each other's minds, their memories (as they recall each other's hidden secret shames without being told) and thoughts (demonstrated in the umpteen roshambo ties between Huggz and Bobcat). Tyler is the one who realizes that this means that his neuroses are now shared with them as well. When he takes his meds, he finds that he can block the corridor connection, making him the only sane (relatively, at least) individual among his increasingly maniacal friends. This crazy leads them to attack one another, first with insults, and then with ghastly physical injury, including scalping and crucifying. Gotta love male bonding, eh?
Once the corridor powers up to a certain level, it revives and reanimates the dead. We don't know that there's any grand design behind it beyond connection, tho. Under the corridor's influence, Huggs, the brains of the outfit, realizes that it is actually just one line of many lines to come, together forming a grid, or network, that ultimately will cover the globe and connect every person on the planet. I kinda wish that notion, and further extrapolation of it, was pushed more.
In the end, the corridor chooses the most empathic of the gang, Chris, to be its emissary, sending him to apparently recruit everyone who lives in the city to which it reaches out. When Tyler forcibly disconnects Chris from the corridor, he is confronted by his mother. Tyler realizes that his mother was actually MADE crazy by the corridor and he attacks the apparition in order to free his mother of the corridor's control and force it to use and possess him instead. When he does this, he seems to exorcise the corridor from everyone it's touched and then he and his mother ('s spirit?) choose to sacrifice themselves rather than let the corridor grow again. The corridor collapses around them, leaving behind only ashes, similar (or identical to?) the ashes of his mother that Tyler spread on the snow of the woods only a day or so earlier. Maybe a hint that the corridor never actually happened, that maybe one or more or all of the gang snapped and attacked and killed all the others.
In the end, only Chris, the empathic fella, the one who was everyone's confidante, lives to not tell the tale.
Keep on keepin on~
No comments:
Post a Comment