Sublime (film)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Sublime |
| Original title | Sublime |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 2007 |
| length | 108 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK No youth approval |
| Rod | |
| Director | Tony Krantz |
| script | Erik Jendresen |
| production | Tony Krantz Daniel Myrick Shawn Papazian |
| music |
Peter Golub Anthony Marinelli |
| camera | Dermott Downs |
| cut | Robert Florio |
| occupation | |
| |
Sublime is a horror film / psychological thriller directed by Tony Krantz based on a script by Erik Jendresen . The main characters are Thomas Cavanagh , Kathleen York , Lawrence-Hilton Jacobs , and Katherine Cunningham-Eves .
action
On the morning of his 40th birthday, George Grieves ( Thomas Cavanagh ) wakes up from a nightmare in which he falls but does not hit the ground. His wife Jenny ( Kathleen York ) wakes up, the two discuss the meaning of the dream, and she formulates the thesis that people who die in their sleep may fall in a dream and do not wake up before they hit.
George spends the day with his wife and children Chloe and Ned and the party that follows with a few friends and his brother. One of the conversations is about (unnecessary) malpractice as the leading cause of death in the United States of America. George himself is preparing for a routine colonoscopy the next day.
The next day, the attending physician, Dr. Sharasi and nurse Zoe George prepare for the operation in the presence of his wife, where George is accidentally injured by a scratch on his leg while sitting in Zoe's wheelchair. When he comes to after the procedure, he is lying alone in a hospital bed. A television commercial is running on the television. He finds a freshly sewn scar on his stomach. When Zoe walks in, he asks her what happened. She explains to him that there were complications during the examination and that he had been transferred to another ward where she shouldn't be.
When a black male nurse in a starched shirt and red bow tie shows up to change George's drip, Zoe falls silent, apparently afraid of the male nurse. Another doctor, Dr. Lichterhand ( John Rubinstein ) walks in and explains to George that the investigation went wrong. Because he was mistaken for another patient, he had inadvertently had a sympatectomy , an endoscopic severing of nerves near the spine to treat excessive sweating .
George keeps dawning and dreams of his wife, his two children and his 40th birthday. Every time he comes to, there is someone else in his room. One time it is a fully bandaged roommate with an amputated hand who warns him about the hospital, then it is again Zoe or the mysterious male nurse with the red bow tie who introduces himself as Mandingo. When George watched from his window as his wife was laughing in another wing of the hospital with Dr. Sharasi entertains, he asks Zoe to take him there. She explains to him that the wing in question is empty, but drives him there anyway in his wheelchair.
In the empty wing, George finds a week-old medical file that bears his name. In the run-down rooms he observes how people are operated on in a bestial way. In one of the rooms he finally sees his wife having sex with Dr. Sharasi has. At the sight of it, George falls out of the wheelchair. When he comes to, he has to talk to the hospital lawyer ( Dan Gerrity ). He explains that he has suffered a hospital infection from the scratch Zoe made before his examination . As he looks at his leg, George is horrified to find that it is almost completely necrotic and passes out again. When he wakes up again, the doctors have amputated half of his lower leg.
Slowly but surely, for George, the lines between dream and reality are blurring. So he is visited at night by Zoe, who tells him that she knows that she has hurt him and wants to make amends. She undresses and gets on the bed. George sees a tattoo covering her entire back. When he asked, Zoe replied that it was a tree that was waiting for spring. Once again, George uses a wheelchair to go to the empty hospital wing, on the first floor of which apparently only foreign patients are cared for. When you want to take his turn, he can first crawl on the floor and escape to the exit. In the open door, through which he can already see the bustling outside world of the hospital driveway, he is dragged back by Mandingo and again passed out.
Finally, Mandingo comes back to his room. He takes off his bow tie and glasses, ties George's hands to the bed and kneels over him to torture him. The same tattoo of a leafy tree grows on his chest. He tortures the helpless George with a pair of rose shears, which was previously advertised on the shopping channel that is constantly on television, and cuts his hands and feet. In the next bed, Mandingo shows him Zoe, who is mutilated in all limbs and also bandaged on the head.
In a parallel scene, one sees George's brother, his wife and the children at the same time, who gather with the hospital staff at the bedside around George, who has been in a coma for months . It turns out that Dr. Sharasi had actually perforated George's intestine during the examination and he then fell into a coma. The hospital's attorney tries to persuade the family to end the life support, but Jenny has made up her mind to keep him alive until her own death. She is the last to leave the hospital bed.
Everything George had seen and experienced since the examination had only happened in his head. In his dream world, George now remembers the morning scene, drags himself seriously injured to the window and throws himself out, whereupon he also dies in the real world.
Storylines
- Framework: George Grieves' 40th birthday and the subsequent colonoscopy; his family in his sickroom and his death
- Core plot: George's dream world during the coma state
interpretation
The initial thesis that George and Jenny formulate in bed at the beginning is taken up and substantiated at the end by the actual death of George by jumping out of the window and the actual impact on the floor.
Through the many dream sequences of George in the form of flashbacks (mostly from his birthday party the previous evening), a connection between George's apparent waking phases and the reality is established, which the following and partly already happened events in his hospital room e.g. Partly explain retrospectively. Extremely improbable and exaggerated bizarre events in George's hospital room, such as the appearance in the TV shop of exactly the same gifts that George received on his birthday, give the viewer an inkling that the main storyline is the fictional world of George Grieves in a coma state.
Overall, George's entire stay in the hospital room is probably the author's idea of the world experienced by coma patients.
The common thread of the film is the criticism of the health system in the United States and the alleged cover-up of malpractice.
criticism
The structure of the film is a classic of this genre and therefore easy to recognize from the point at which George's perception becomes excessively surreal. Aside from the scenes in which Mandingo, the African-American 'nurse', begins to mutilate George with rose shears, the tension of the film builds on the uncertainty of the actual effects of the surgery - that alone does not make the film deserve that Attribute "horror", rather it is a psychological thriller.
The lexicon of the international film judges: “ The cautiously staged horror thriller tells the overcomplicated plot in nested flashbacks, which at best brings about artistry that has been taken to extremes. "
background
Sublime was released directly on DVD in the USA on March 13, 2007 ( Warner Home Video - Raw Feed Series, first film is Rest Stop ). The budget for the film was about $ 1.8 million.
Web links
- Sublime in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Individual evidence
- ^ Journal film-dienst and Catholic Film Commission for Germany (eds.), Horst Peter Koll and Hans Messias (ed.): Lexikon des Internationale Films - Filmjahr 2007 . Schüren Verlag, Marburg 2008. ISBN 978-3-89472-624-9