Brad Anderson (2014)
Whatever happened to Goth? Who but the most faithful macmahonians remember today the oeuvre of the likes of Terence Fischer etc.? Unlike the Western, officially declared dead around the late 70s, only to keep kicking back from the grave sporadically but interestingly, Goth went from low budget to no budget some 40 years ago(discounting Giallo mutations and the like) and has for nigh-on 30 years survived barely on Tim Burton´s single-handed genial output (coincidentally, runs until January 25 an exhibition at the British Library in London devoted to the gothic genre in all media, including film, entitled Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination). Stonehearst Asylum is a further rare but welcome dark spot in the midst of the blinding light of non-gothness.
Stonehearst Asylum is the 9th feature film of Brad Anderson, who crossed over from romantic comedies to horror/fantasy around the turn of the century, having namely penned The Machinist (2004), perhaps his best effort to date (at any rate, the only one I recall seeing) which featured Christian Bale, who reportedly lost some 20 kilos to play the main role.
Stonehearst Asylum is very loosely based on a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, delightfully entitled “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” and tells of a young medical doctor who assumes duties in an “Insane Asylum” (says so at the gate) in 19th century England, only to find out that inside nothing is quite what it seems…
The film is a masterpiece of histrionic casting: Ben Kingsley as the asylum´s sinister director, Michael Caine as one of the (apparently) unjustly confined inmates, and especially Jim Sturgess as the young doc expressing confounded bemusement in the face of absurdity (couldn´t stop thinking of Michael Palin in many a Monty Python sketch) as plot twists and role reversals slowly blur the frontier between sanity and otherwise.
Samuel Becket, whom The MacMahonian never misses an opportunity to quote, once wrote that “we´re all born mad, some remain so”. It is in this particular point one wishes Stonehearst Asylum had gone farther and deeper, but no matter, The MacMahonian is warming up to shortlisting Brad Anderson as an aspiring Tim Burton.