Session 9
All actors and roles (10)
Short description
Session 9 takes place at the Danvers State Mental Hospital in Massachusetts, a facility that has stood empty for fifteen years. Gordon, a Scottish immigrant who runs a hazardous-materials removal company, wins the contract to clear asbestos from the building, and to secure the deal he promises the local engineer that the job will take only a week. He brings a small crew with him into the wards and corridors of the sprawling, decaying hospital, where the atmosphere grows steadily more oppressive and the men's tensions with one another begin to surface.
The film is a drama, horror and mystery directed by Brad Anderson, who wrote the screenplay with Stephen Gevedon. It followed Anderson's Happy Accidents and came before The Machinist, TransSiberian and later films. Peter Mullan plays Gordon, with David Caruso, Stephen Gevedon, Josh Lucas, Brendan Sexton III and Paul Guilfoyle in the main roles. The production had a budget of 2 million US dollars and took a similar amount at the worldwide box office.
On IMDb the film holds 6.4 out of 10 from around 67,000 votes, while on TMDB it has 6.1 from roughly 1,000 votes. A critics' rating of 7.1 from 75 reviews places professional assessments noticeably above the audience scores on both sites.
What's left behind the scenes
- The tapes seen in the footage are genuine and were discovered after the hospital was closed.
- The film's plot emerged only after the location was found.
- The oppressive atmosphere of the film was created, in part, by the surroundings, and the film crew added practically nothing to the items already on site (except for meat hooks hung in the kitchen, surgical gloves hung in another room, and a metal tub in a third). Almost everything else was found there. In one place, blood samples from some patient were even discovered.
- During the filming of the scene where the characters of Paul Guilfoyle and Peter Mullane talk about an order to remove asbestos, a flight school student learning to be a pilot circled the filming location for nearly 3 hours. Filming had to be done with constant interruptions – only when the plane was further away from the set could they film, and when it approached, filming was stopped.
- It appears that the fictional “Patricia Willard scandal” mentioned by Mike at the beginning of the film is a reference to a series of scandals involving “satanism and sexual coercion” that took place in the United States around the 1980s, including the Amirault family scandal in Massachusetts in 1986.
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