Review by Nia Edwards-Behi
A young man disappears shortly after ingesting an experimental drug as part of a research project. An old friend decides to investigate his disappearance when she digs deeper into his research into drug experiments by the US government during the 1960s. She finds herself in cahoots with a washed-up author, and together they desperately attempt to escape the murderous beings which seem to emerge from the rift in existential planes caused by taking the drug. Banshee Chapter’s jump off point is the real-life Project MKUltra, the decades-long CIA operation which saw thousands of experiments conducted on human test subjects in order to research the possibility of mind control. Although a variety of methods were used – almost all entirely illegal and, hopefully by anyone’s standards, immoral – the project is most famous for dosing test subjects with LSD and other drugs.
Given the incredibly interesting historical inspiration for the film, the end result is really quite lacking. Although, overall, I enjoyed Banshee Chapter, there are several major weaknesses to the film that mean I can’t whole-heartedly recommend it. First and foremost, Katia Winter as the film’s lead, Anne, is painfully dull. Anne is supposedly a woman desperately seeking information about her missing, likely dead, friend, and further more a red-blooded journalist seeking to uncover the dark history her friend was researching. Whether a poor performance from Winter, a symptom of weak storytelling, or, more likely, a combination of both, Anne is an uncharismatic lead character, lacking completely in the drive and enthusiasm that she should have. She comes across as bored from the very start of the film and as a result it’s particularly difficult to care about her fate by the film’s close, when she finally gets to be a bit more animated.
The weakness of the lead character does appear to be a result of all-over poor storytelling. The narrative is ham-fisted and forced, while the dialogue, though never laugh-out-loud bad, often leaves a lot to be desired. Having said this, Ted Levine is wonderful as the Hunter S. Thompson pastiche Thomas Blackburn, a drug-addled author. Levine gruffs his way through the film’s best dialogue (though, admittedly, that’s not the highest praise), never quite going so far as to chew the scenery. Given the explicit real-life point of reference for his character, his eventual fate in the film, without wishing to be too spoilery, seems somewhat tasteless.
Another gripe I have, which does seem to be a matter of personal taste, is with the style of the film. My heart sank a little at the first instance of found footage in the film, but happily said sequences are sporadic, varied and put to good use – so for the most part we have video records of experiments in place of people running around an abandoned lab. Bizarrely my gripe then lies with the majority of the film, the bits that aren’t found footage. This is entirely because they are stylistically similar to the found footage segments. The camera movement is very fluid and handheld, and while never really verité in style, it distracted me that the segments were filmed in such an indistinct way to the supposedly ‘documentary’ or found-footage elements of the film.
All these gripes aside, though, when the film gets down to business, it delivers on jumps and scares. Tension is effectively built in these set pieces, and while many of the jumps are predictable they’re nevertheless extremely effective at times. This is aided by the film’s real-world historical connection, the idea that hallucinogenic drug experiments did take place augmenting the impact of the experiments going wrong. However, as I said to begin with, this undeniably spooky concept is never entirely taken advantage of, and instead it feels like a bit of a wasted opportunity to have so strongly linked the film’s narrative to these real life experiments.
Essentially, then, though I wouldn’t necessarily discourage anyone from watching Banshee Chapter – it’s enjoyable enough – I also wouldn’t particularly recommend it. You might jump in the right places and the hairs on your arms might stand up once or twice, when the credits roll you might just feel a little bit cheated.
Banshee Chapter is released to Region 2 DVD and VOD on 27th January 2014, from Intense Distribution & 101 Films.