A 9? Only on a Scale from 1 to 16

I've occasionally talked about how some of the better experiences I've had watching a movie were when I knew virtually nothing about the movie before sitting down to see it. It seems to me this is even more likely to happen with the movie in question is some kind of suspense tale, like recently, when I watched The House of the Devil.

But there is another way it can go, and that's what happened when I decided to take up the Netflix Suggestion Gods on their recommendation of a 2001 suspense movie called Session 9. I didn't even bother to look and see that the star of the movie was David Caruso, the whispering over-actor that headlines CSI: My-Hammy. If I had, I almost certainly would have passed, but I got blinded by the promise of something unexpected, and the notion that "we really think you'll like it."

Session 9 is the story of an asbestos removal crew that is tasked with cleaning up an historically significant and preserved building. Said building is a sprawling, creepy-looking mental institution that has been abandoned for decades, with some rumor-filled ghost tale about what happened to make them close the place down. Honestly, there's some potential in the concept. You got "haunted house story" in my "insane asylum story?" It's like chocolate and peanut butter!

The problem is, there end up being at least two stories going. One involves a particular member of the crew that happens on some old reel-to-reel recordings of one of the final series of patient interviews from "back in the day." Over the week they're all working on the building, he sneaks away to listen to the next psychiatric session (hence, the film's title), and gets ever closer to learning what might have happened. This is the more interesting of the two storylines. It plays out rather effectively, almost in the style of an old radio drama, where you have only the audio to take in, and your mind fills in a lot of the details as your imagination roams free.

Unfortunately, that's the plot line that receives short shrift in the movie. The principle thread concerns the ways that being in this old building starts to affect the team members psychologically. One goes missing, others start to see things, and more. You'd understand why this gets the main focus of the film, as it certainly sounds like the more compelling storyline... or at least the more conventional, for a horror/suspense movie.

The problem is, for you to care about the breakdown of a group of characters, you have to care something for the characters. With both flawed scripting and acting, none of them really merit any level of concern. There's an even bigger problem with the writing and editing, in that the film is all building up to a "twist ending" of sorts, and yet the truth of it is tipped very, very early on in the film. In fact, it's handled in such a bland way, you don't even get the sense that information was intentionally being concealed. You just get this early, slightly vague scene that ends abruptly and leaves you thinking, "oh, I guess something like this must have just happened," followed an hour-plus later by the shocking revelation that, "um, yeah, it did happen, and you're supposed to be surprised now!"

No.

There is something strong at the core of the film, but overall, it's buried too deeply in the need for one or two more thorough script re-writes and better casting. I give Session 9 a C+.