Review of Psych:9

Psych:9 (2010)
5/10
Ghost story or Serial Killer movie?
12 April 2011
A young girl gets a night job at an abandoned hospital doing clerical work. She's not alone though, there is another man on level 5 doing similar work. The woman starts to get visions of creepy things in the hospital, which slowly makes her lose her mind. It doesn't help that there is also a serial killer deemed The Night Hawk roaming the streets outside.

Psych 9 goes in too many directions and none of them come to a cohesive ending. Too much is left up being ambiguous and the film asks way too much from the audience. Big plot questions are never answered and we are left to assume things. Psych 9 doesn't know what type of film it wants to be, it's a slasher film at one point, then a supernatural spook story the next. The story should have concentrated on one aspect and stuck with it.

Sara Foster plays Roslyn, the young woman who gets the new job. She hears and sees things that a creepy, this takes a toll on her. She begins to go a tad crazy and we get to know a bit more about her past. Foster does a good job here, she has quite a bit of depth to her character, more than you would expect from a film like this. Her character is a lot like Nina from the recent Black Swan. The man up on the 5th floor is Dr. Irvin Clement played by Cary Elwes. His two most famous roles are Dr. Lawrence Gordon from Saw and more memorably Westley from The Princess Bride. he mostly sits and chats up Foster in this role, nothing too challenging or memorable to comment on.

There is a detective after Night Hawk, played by the always reliable and awesome 24/7 Michael Biehn. Again, underused a bit, his scenes consist of him showing up, asking questions and then leaving. The memorable role here belongs to Foster and the creepy factor belongs to the hospital. Session 9 has some similar elements to this film and they pulled it off better. Here, it feels disjointed which leaves the viewer confused. I sure was at points and even still am.

A lot of the film has that "seen it before" vibe. Its cues are straight from other films. The confusing parts are the faults of the filmmakers, for either not knowing a definitive answer, or never having one. Parts of it feel incomplete and like two different movies. I would have liked them to have left the Night Hawk killer subplot at the door and concentrated the the hospital and how crazy Foster became. I sure as hell wouldn't work at that place at night.
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