IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.
Released: 14th October
Seen: 18th October
Some settings are just inherently creepy which makes them an ideal spot to put a horror film. Dark woods with no one around, the middle of the ocean and, of course, hospitals. Why hospitals are so creepy is hard to explain, most likely because it’s the kind of place where there’s a high probability that it’ll end up being the last place you see alive. It also helps that hospitals have such a familiar look (we’ve all been in one at some point) that we all instantly notice when there’s something wrong about one which is handy if you want to scare an audience. Of course, if you want to scare an audience the main thing you have to do is try and be scary, which is one of many things that Disquiet doesn’t even think about doing at any point.
Disquiet begins with Sam (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) getting into a bad car accident, one that causes him to end up being taken to a seemingly abandoned hospital that also doesn’t seem to have a main entrance. He wakes up only to end up being attacked by a strange old man who occasionally doesn’t seem to have a face. Once he subdues the mysterious man, he runs into a bunch of other people who are apparently normal, along with two guides called Virgil (Garry Chalk) and Lily (Rachelle Goulding).
Virgil is trying to talk the group into going to the top floor of the hospital, Lily thinks everyone should try to go to the basement. Along the way everyone in the little group will be tested for their morals, killed multiple times by mysterious forces, have things keep trying to stop them from going in either direction, and keep trying to take an elevator that also keeps trying to kill them… it sounds more interesting than it actually is, I can assure you of that.
If that paragraph doesn’t make things clear enough, Disquiet is a big old religious metaphor done with all the subtlety of a wrench to the face. Its lack of subtlety is so obvious that within minutes of meeting Lily and Virgil you can guess the exact thing they’re about to represent… hell, Lily is wearing Red, Virgil is in muted tones with shocks of pure white hair almost illuminating his face. It’s not even cute in how unsubtle it is, it feels like Disquiet thinks the audience is goddamn stupid and it has to make this metaphor as clear as humanly possible. The problem is that the metaphor is uninteresting and somewhat nonsensical at times. It feels like the people who made this think they have to do a metaphor so they picked the most basic one and jammed it in as haphazardly as possible.
It doesn’t help that the parts that aren’t obvious metaphors are just flat-out stupid. Disquiet tries to touch on heavy topics like police brutality and plastic surgery (two topics it deals with in exactly the same way) but does nothing with them beyond just showing they exist as things in the world. The police brutality story is particularly badly handled as the victim of the brutality doesn’t even get to be a character, they just exist in order to be shot by the cop who actually does get several major moments to explore his character. He even gets an ending, something denied to his victim. It’d be infuriating if any of these characters were actually interesting but they’re not, the fact that everything else around this sucks almost helps hide how bad this problem is.
Speaking of that cop, he is emblematic of another big problem with Disquiet which is that there are absolutely no stakes whatsoever. Characters die multiple times throughout the film, in the case of the cop in almost the exact same way. This isn’t a fun silly thing like in Happy Death Day where the main character dying multiple times is part of the point, it’s just very stupid and an excuse to get a character out of the way for about 10 minutes until we need them again, but of course, that means that once it becomes clear that characters will not actually die it removes all tension and thus makes it impossible to give a shit about what happens to the lead.
It also doesn’t help things that the lead character is painfully dull. It’s a fairly good sign that a character is going to be bad when they have to tell you key character details in a voiceover at the beginning. Obviously, there are some exceptions to this (Patrick Bateman for instance) but more often than not it shows that the people making the film know their lead character isn’t interesting so they just shove a voice over on some B-roll to trick the audience into thinking that the lead is actually worth giving a damn about. He’s not, this character is absolutely boring as shit and performed like it’s a contractual obligation. He blends into the stark white hospital walls pretty nicely but that’s about it, he doesn’t have a defined character or an interesting moral code or anything like that. He’s a blank page that does whatever’s required in the moment, even if that thing would completely contradict something that happened minutes ago.
For a film that’s barely a full 90 minutes long, Disquiet sure feels like it’s padding the fuck out of the runtime, especially at the end when they spell out the metaphor that you worked out within the first 15 minutes. They seriously repeat entire scenes in full for no other reason than to make sure you get exactly what they’re doing, because Disquiet thinks you are very stupid and need to have every last thing spelled out. It doesn’t help make things clearer, it just gets annoying and all builds to a dull and uninteresting conclusion.
Disquiet had the basics it needed to be interesting, the setting is good and the metaphor is simple enough that it could be interesting with a little bit of effort… but no one cared, or if they did then that care doesn’t show in the final product. It’s 90 minutes of trying to avoid using the elevator combined with idiots behaving like idiots and occasional loud sounds. There’s nothing actually scary or intriguing going on here, it’s a bunch of nothing that insists it has something worth saying. The only thing that needs to be said is the time of death because this film absolutely flatlined ages ago.
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