Review #260: Session 9 (2001)

This review was originally written in October 2023.

Gabe's Horror Movie October Review #14 - Session 9 (2001)

I had never seen Session 9 before, but I feel like I've noticed it mentioned in a lot of places (lists of best horror movies, lists of influential horror movies, etc.) so I was pretty excited to watch this one. Overall I think it was pretty good but I'm not 100% sure I understand it (or maybe I was just expecting something more than I got). In fact I spent most of the movie not very impressed, until I reached a significant twist near the end that was actually really good, and elevated the rest of the film a bit. I think there's going to be mild spoilers ahead; in order to make some of the points I want to make, I'm going to refer to a certain character as "Dude" in order to hide the twist of who they actually are.

So, Session 9 follows an asbestos cleaning crew that gets hired to remove the asbestos from an old insane asylum. The owner, Gordon, secures the job by offering to finish it in only a few days, leading to tension from the rest of the crew. His second-in-command, Phil, has issues with Hank, one of the workers that Phil has a grudge against for stealing his girlfriend. Mike, another worker, used to be a law student or something. And finally there's Jeff, Gordon's nephew, and Craig, who shows up late in the film because Hank has gone missing and they needed extra help.

So the plot of the movie is basically: Mike finds some old recordings of nine therapy sessions with a mental patient named Mary Hobbes, who was suffering from a multiple personality disorder, and he becomes obsessed with these recordings. Hank finds some treasure bricked up inside a false wall, and is planning to run away with it but when he tries to sneak into the building to take the treasure, he's attacked by a shadowy figure and goes missing. Tensions rise between the workers, Gordon is under a lot of stress because he lost his temper and hit his wife, and as the tensions reach a breaking point Jeff seemingly spots Hank but he acts more like a ghost than a person. It all culminates when Dude (one of the aforementioned characters, name changed to hide the twist) turns out to have gone insane, and quickly kills or lobotomizes everybody else. We're then treated to the ninth session recording of Mary Hobbes, where it's implied that one of her personalities is actually like, an evil spirit or something? And maybe it possessed Dude, or maybe it didn't.

First things first: the twist actually caught me by surprise. I had seen the inklings of a twist coming as early as the halfway point of the film, but the twist I caught on to turned out to be a red herring, and the ACTUAL twist was pretty good when it was revealed. With that out of the way though, I think this movie was pretty lackluster, and it really seemed like it was setting certain things up that didn't ever come into play. (Maybe those were meant to be red herrings, maybe I was latching on to things I wasn't supposed to, maybe they were just missed opportunities. Who knows.) Like, there's so much talk early on about how when the asylum closed, they just threw all of their remaining patients out on the street, which really led me to believe that Dude was going to be revealed to have been a mental patient in the past, and that explains why he turned homicidal. (He wasn't, at least as far as I could tell.) Another idea that I felt the movie was hinting at was that the Mary Hobbes story was somehow connected (like, maybe she had come back to the asylum or something?) but as it is, the only connection between the main plot and the session recordings is that way, way, way at the very end, there's the most scant implication possible, of Dude (I guess) being possessed by one of Mary Hobbes' personalities. (Except, I didn't catch that at all, I only noticed it in several of the synopses I skimmed when looking up trivia. Until I read that on IMDB, I had concluded that the Mary Hobbes subplot was completely disconnected from the rest of the film.) Whatever the case, it amounts to a huge amount of time spent listening to these recordings and an incredibly flimsy connection, which really made me feel punished for paying close attention to it.

This isn't a bad movie, I would even say it was a good movie, but definitely not great. It was probably influential at the time but nowadays it's just another horror movie about a maybe-haunted asylum.

Overall Rating: 6/10 Empty Jars of Peanut Butter

Cursed Film: Apparently, multiple actors and crew reported strange spooky happenings on-set, including one actor claiming that while filming on the roof, a voice in his head told him to jump off!