For those who are still reading, let me just say Session 9 is a great movie. The setting is an abandoned asylum riddled with asbestos in Danvers, MA. The setting alone is enough to have my hooked, this was apparently filmed on site, which caught my interest since Danvers is pretty close to Boston. I'm not one to really enjoy psycho films, since I like the villains or monsters to be larger than life, horror movies generally stray from plenty elements of normal life so the villains, in my opinion, should also be more monster-like to match this lack of reality. However, this film did rather well with the theme. Throughout the movie, the main character, Gordon, is losing his mind. The crew he works with to clean the hospital all slowly catch on to this and begin getting irritable as they continue their work. One worker suddenly goes missing, and another is blamed since he had problems with the missing person. Tensions continue to rise as the week goes on, and another worker begins to listen to tapes of the previous patients sessions, discovering the case of a schizophrenic girl whose alternate personality murdered her brother and parents, keeping all of the information from her. While this is going on, the other workers find their friend who had been missing, and they begin frantically searching for him. The group separates, the power goes out, and the eponymous last tape, labeled Session 9, is played. The ultimate suspense befalls the movie as the characters are now picked off one by one by a mysterious assailant, and then the movie comes to a close as Gordon finds all the bodies, which he realizes were victims of him, or rather an alternate personality he and the previous patient of Session 9 had, Simon. Pretty intense stuff.
That was more of a summary, but I mostly mentioned parts I liked about the movie. They constantly threw curve balls of suspense and disappearances that had you blaming Gordon, then another worker, and so on. I even suspected supernatural forces (which were kind of the case). Overall, the movie kept me on my toes, and there were tons of plot exposition and suspenseful turnarounds that kept the story enthralling for me. I enjoyed all the tapes, schizophrenia is always a good plot device for the villains in these kinds of films, and my favorite psycho horrors usually involve schizophrenia (like Identity). The tapes made it so much cooler, and the twist ending is probably my favorite part, it's always better when the movies don't end happily or just don't seem to end. This movies great, and if you still want to watch it, I'd definitely suggest it.
