Main cast: Millie Brady (Claire), Akshay Kumar (Amir), Diarmuid Noyes (Ray), Brenock O’Connor (Paul Murray), Abby Fitz (Alison), Shonagh Marie (Vanessa), Frank Blake (Marcus), and Pollyanna McIntosh (Dr Ellen Burke)
Director: Ian Hunt-Duffy
Double Blind appears like a medical thriller, but this Irish film quickly morphs into something more appropriately considered horror once things go wrong.
Blackwood Pharmaceuticals are looking for volunteers to participate in the ominous-sounding BRN14 clinical trial.
Claire, who is marked as a very obvious final girl from the very beginning, joins a bunch of people in this clinical trial. There’s the nice nerdy guy Amir, the annoyingly chatty Alison, the surly Vanessa, the conspiracy theorist type Paul, and the token jerk of the bunch Marcus… wait, or is it Ray?
Anyway, the names of the rest if the gang that aren’t Claire or Amir don’t matter because it’s pretty clear that they are here to just pad up the cast and provide the body count. Sure enough, they soon experience side effects that culminate in Alison having a bloody and painful-looking death.
The lab quickly goes into lock down upon Alison’s death, killing Dr Ellen Burke and causing the rest to deal with the realization that should they fall asleep, their eyes will start bleeding and they will die, just like Alison.
Well, they just have to go without sleep for 24 hours or so, as surely the lock down would end after that, and help would come. Right? Right?
I watch this one with minimal expectations, and I have to say, this thing is far better than I anticipated.
Sure, pretty much most of it is predictable in a “I’ve really seen this many times before in similar movies” manner, but the movies does the right thing in spending its first 30 or so minutes to flesh out Claire and Amir just enough to make me want to find out what will happen to them. It also helps that the cast members deliver solid performances for the most part.
As for the scary parts, I get some predictable “sleep deprivations make people see scary stuff and do crazy, violent things” moments, but the movie makes the effort to build up these scenes to deliver the scary pay-off well instead of just doing lazy jump scares. Hence, these scenes work.
Still, I have to confess that I laugh out loud at the scene of the poor thing that assumes that they’re walking into an elevator only to realize too late that they have actually activated an incinerator and walked into it. Come on, you have to admit that that is hilarious!
All in all, I have to hand it to the folks involved in this thing. Nothing about this feels remotely different or original, but the movie remains a riveting watch from start to finish. I can only imagine what they could have done with a less derivative script!
