It has been a while since an EFIHR post has gone up. I was away for a while and didn’t watch a single film, then before that I got absurdly engrossed in the series Black Sails which is all about pirates and boats and boobs. It is not a film though so I wont even write about it. So I finally had a little spare time after the post holiday comedown/work catch up and settled down to Session 9. The premise is pretty excellent, some asbestos removal workers take a job in a former mental institute and spooky stuff ensues. It all starts off well, the actual setting is really brilliant. I am not sure if they actually just found an old crappy building which was like this, or if they have a top rate art director, but this place looks spooky as. Whats good about this aspect of it is that most of the film still takes place during the day with sunlight streaming in through the windows, but it still manages to maintain the spooky, mostly through liberal use of white asbestos sheets, meat hooks and abandoned wheelchairs. It all falls apart after that though, the plot is pretty awful and is sort of a lift of Shutter Island but with less thought put into it. Or perhaps it is more over thought, this could have worked so well as a straight up horror film with some good jumpy moments, the setting is perfect and the actors (the ginger guy from CSI) are more than up to it – but despite a couple of really creepy bits it never plays out like this, choosing to go dumb intellectual psychological horror instead. The director Brad Anderson has made some really great movies since (see Transiberian) along the same sort of psychological thriller vein, we can put this down as a learning curve movie. Its not the worst thing you could watch, and its almost worth it for a couple of really great basement scares, but it could have been so much more.