Burning Inside (2009, Review) Channel Midnight
Director: Nathan Wrann
Cast: Michael Wrann, Kristina Powis, Bob Tschilske, Bret Logan
Channel Midnight / NTSC Region 1 / Unrated / Widescreen / Digital Surround / Approx. 120 minutes
DVD Extras: 12-part featurette containing more than one hour of behind-the-scenes footage and interviews / Collection of trailers for BURNING INSIDE and other exciting upcoming releases
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Art-house cinema can be very hit and miss. You run the risk of an artist/filmmaker being too full themselves and wallowing in their vision. They can be pretentious, self-serving and worst of all, dull. But since most of these films are indie productions and are created by artists, you can also get raw, passionate, personal, original and often very, very graphic cinema. Of course there is also the problem of having both in the course of one movie. There are aspects of the film that are utterly brilliant but are mired in artistic vision and pretense. Such is the case with writer/director Nathan Wrann’s industrial art-house grinder, Burning Inside.
A patient – later dubbed “John Doe” – wakes up in a hospital bed after being in a coma and has no memory of his past life. He is cared for by a selfish doctor and a beautiful, loving nurse named Jennifer. Once a month he has sessions with a psychotherapist to try and break through the walls that are blocking his memory, but to no avail. After a while, he is released from the hospital and moves into what seems to be his old house with his new wife, Nurse Jennifer. But he is tortured by a horrible need for revenge on four men, the reason which becomes evident after he finds a film containing what seems to be him and his former fiancee, Jennifer. But is he remembering the past, or is he a psychopath in the present?
A film whose opening scene is a five-plus minute static, overhead camera shot of a nurse slowly shaving a comatose patient is indeed setting a tone. Burning is filled with lingering, deliberately overwrought scenes to fill the viewer with unease and really drive the tone home. The problem is that the majority of people will turn that shit off in a matter of minutes. I dare say that the casual horror fan would have either fast-forwarded or clicked stop on their remotes in that first shaving scene. I can understand what Wrann was doing. I can see the madness in his method, but I wrestled with the idea of not finishing the film after wading through the first hour. But I didn’t and I have to say that the second act did pick up the pace a bit, but only a bit.
The style of the film is unquestionably beautiful and interesting. The variable super high contrast used through most of the film melds well with Wrann’s fantastic eye for composition. The intense lighting also gels with the high contrasts as it actually washes out a lot of the picture and leaves you with dark, emotional and intense blacks, not to mention the long, wonderful shadows it throws. The post production must have taken as long as the actual shoot. The editing room was also busy with creating jerky, broken transitions from scene to scene, which I would have thought distracting, but actually worked well with the flow. Even the stilted delivery of the dialogue, which normally you would chalk up to bad acting, amped up the surreal goings-on. The soundtrack, or lack thereof really, was like being trapped in a large machine with a ever-present hum and ambient mechanical sounds.
Wrann is obviously influenced by movies like Eraserhead, PI and even Tetsuo, but I also see a lot of David Lynch-type storytelling in there as well. I really think that this approximately 120 minute opus could have been trimmed down to 90 minutes or less and been a masterpiece of artistic horror. Greg Lamberson over at Fear Zone said that he highly recommends Burning Inside to “lovers of smart horror”. I recommend it for art-house horror fans with a high tolerance for extremely slow pacing but love a highly stylized, violent and beautiful movie.
