Direction: Billy Senese
Country: USA
Shane Carruth (the mastermind behind Upstream Color) embodies an obsessive, hard-working psychiatrist in The Dead Center, a supernatural low-key horror pic written, directed, and produced by Billy Senese. Considerably better than Closer to God, his debut feature from 2014, The Dead Center still is a clichéd film impregnated with demonic transferences, haunting pasts, and unexplainable deaths.
The busy and oftentimes insubordinate Dr. Daniel Forrester (Carruth) struggles to understand what’s wrong with the latest admitted patient (Jeremy Childs) in the Fulton County Hospital. The man, who had committed suicide, is a strange amnesiac who literally woke up from the dead and escaped the morgue to where his body was sent.
Under hypnotic treatment, he unveils some more details of his obscure past, also confessing he killed a man. Doctors and nurses will experience the power of the malevolent entity that possesses his body and mind.
Besides the unimpressive and somewhat expected finale, the film misses that definite creepy factor that would bring him to the forefront. There are some freaky moments elevated by strident sonic attacks, which are not enough to overcome the shortcomings.
Mediocrely entertaining and repetitive in the procedures, The Dead Center lacks guts and never coheres into something special. Its characters are bland in posture and underdeveloped in their essence. The film might not be as much creative as we would have hoped, but at least it doesn’t waste time on giving useless explanations for the occult puzzle. This is perhaps the most valuable aspect that Senese has to offer.
