ClownStrophobia (2009) - 1.5/4

ClownStrophobia is, I suppose, a tale of two psychiatric patients, one of whom is creatively known as Patient X and the other is 'Snuffles' the murderous clown. Both patients are under the care--and I use the term 'care' very lightly--of Dr. Janelle Wethers (Suzanne Lauren) and her own psychiatrist, Dr. Boyd (Rocco George). Dr. Wethers suffers from coulrophobia because her brother is Snuffles and he killed their parents. To overcome her fear, she concocts some sort of conspiracy that is never wholly explained. She manipulates Dr. Boyd into bringing a group of four juvenile delinquents, all of whom share her coulrophobia and a link to Patient X, to the asylum for a therapy session and then into releasing Snuffles. Ostensibly her intentions are to cure everyone of coulrophobia, but it becomes clear she has something much more sinister in mind. Meanwhile, a busty nurse monitors Patient X, who delivers emotionally unsettling monologues.

I found it interesting how the psychiatric hospital in ClownStrophobia hasn't been closed down. It is the most bizarrely unprofessional place. Patient X's nurse continually resists X's delusions. Even a first year nurse would know that one should never do that. It takes years of therapy to work through delusions. They must be humoured temporarily. Then there's the staff. They play cards with prescription drugs as ante. They're also permitted to have a costume party in the asylum. A few confusing scenes suggests they torture patients for kicks. Then there's Dr. Wethers's treatment of the delinquents. She shakes her head in exasperation when one well-mannered boy in the group explains how he lost his temper and struck his principal. It's very odd. Perhaps this was all intended as sly satire on the part of writer-director Geraldine Winters. Either way, it creates a sense of the total incompetence of those charged with the care of the mind, their total obliviousness when dealing with the very subject of their expertise, the human mind. They're mad psychiatrists, like the lunatics playing doctor in Peer Gynt.

There have been a few mad psychiatrist films lately. Scorsese's Shutter Island, DeCoteau's The Pit and the Pendulum, and now ClownStrophobia, all involve conspiracies designed by those charged with the science of the mind. Ordinarily medical doctors were the cinematic mad scientists, taking liberties with the body, taking apart the body. The social need to address medical science with paranoia seems to have subsided in favour of a need to so address psychiatric science. Perhaps fifteen years of programs like E.R., Grey's Anatomy, and so forth have made us more trusting of doctors than ever. Psychiatrists haven't been so vindicated. Many have a fundamental distrust of them. Those who can heal can harm.

Although the concept of a mad person of science is still present, the shift to a science of the mind has transformed the mode with which the madness is expressed. The traditional mad scientist is extremely antisocial, concerned only with his experiments. Colin Clive's portrayal of Dr. Frankenstein in Frankenstein (1931) is as a man so obsessed with science he risks losing his fiancee. The mad scientist's experiments are private, obsessively private, admitting no external examiners unless necessary. Usually this is because their experiments are either so ridiculed or so reviled in academic and social circles that they've become recluses. One sees this in Frankenstein, WereWolf of London (1935), The Devil-Doll (1936), Son of Frankenstein (1939), Les yeux sans face (1960), "The Incredible Doktor Markesan" in Boris Karloff's Thriller (1962), and nearly every other mad scientist film. The transgressive experiments become objects of horror in their creation, where, as in Les yeux sans face and The Body Snatcher (1945), people must be murdered for the sake of the experiment; and they become objects of horror in their expansion beyond the control of the scientist, where, as in Frankenstein, Re-Animator (1985), the experiments themselves begin terrorizing and even killing.

Mad psychiatrist films lack this isolationism. The psychiatrist is in an inherently social position. The object of a psychiatrist's study is not something that can be taken to an isolated lab and taken apart. The psychiatrist must be in a position of trust and with that of power. The experiments of the psychiatrists in all three, Shutter Island, The Pit and the Pendulum, and ClownStrophobia, involve a conspiracy involving multiple people. The experiment is a social one, with society itself and the individual minds of those acting within society as the objects of experimentation as opposed to a tangible substance. The experimenter remains coldly above society, a master manipulator arranging people in her project as Dr. Frankenstein arranges body parts. The experiment doesn't need to become an object of horror, as it is already an object of horror. As countless Big Brother films and series like The X-Files show, the project of manipulation en masse is already feared. So if mad scientists films condensed a general fear about what blasphemous abominations scientists could be developing behind the closed doors of their laboratories, mad psychiatrist films condense a fear about the abominations psychiatrists could be making of us before our very eyes, under our very noses. In a society saturated in anti-depressants perhaps this distrust isn't unwarranted.

On the other hand, the psychiatrist may just be semiotically valuable. In films where the terrors of the mind are expressed in the physical world, a psychiatrist is the ideal mediator and even instigator for the transfer of a subconscious nightmare into an experienced reality. In some sense this is what's going on in ClownStrophobia. Janelle's conspiracy is never totally clear, but her experiment relies upon manifesting the object of horror, the clown, in the world in the hopes of ultimately not just repressing it as has been done for years but of finally destroying it. Winters puts considerable care into making the clown and clown-fear motif pervasive. Both Patient X and Dr. Wethers's brother are obsessed with clowns. Dr. Wethers's father, who founded the asylum, was a birthday clown. Patient X's parents were, she claims, circus clowns. Patient X's nurse, Dr. Winters, and all the juvenile delinquents are afraid of clowns. One of the delinquents even claims, rather foolishly, that clowns steal souls. Janelle's experiment makes the clown-fearers face their fear in the body of the clown-obsessed in situations where they must destroy or be destroyed by the object of fear. Her experiment also involves Patient X somehow. All of the juvenile delinquents are supposed to have a connection to her, but in actuality only one is revealed to have a relationship to her and this relationship is never given any significance.

The whole experiment is, unfortunately, fundamentally confused. Snuffles the killer clown naturally begins killing everyone. If the plan is to cure anyone, well, they aren't afraid of clowns anymore: they're dead. If the plan is to hope the delinquents will kill Snuffles, she must be a gambling woman, because it's highly unlikely that they would kill him. The moment that should tie everything together, when we learn the relationship of Patient X to another character, only emphasizes how dissipated the film's events are. The character's relationship to Patient X contributes nothing to the narrative's action and in fact no characters are privy to the information. The idea of an unrealized relationship can be found in Picnic at Hanging Rock as well. But where it has a purpose in Picnic, it is merely a miscalculation in ClownStrophobia. The moment is obviously supposed to be important. That importance, however, evaporates under the slightest scrutiny. The character's actions and fate all occur by chance, the relationship explaining nothing, concluding nothing.

The best scenes in ClownStrophobia, incidentally, are those with Patient X (Ebru Yonak). Winters's does her best writing for these scenes. But the real value in these scenes comes from Ebru Yonak. Yonak's performance is unsettling and powerful. Her muscular control, vocal command, and delivery is exquisite. She caused me genuine unease as I watched, waiting for her to explode. Everything she says sounds like she's trying to restrain a flood of raw emotion, whether she's speaking threateningly of dark secrets or meekly requesting her nurse's pantyhose. Yonak is easily the most talented person involved in ClownStrophobia. In these scenes Winters suggests that the rest of the film may be in Patient X's mind. Janelle shares the clown-father and Snuffles the clown-obsession with Patient X. They could both be parts of her subconscious life. The rhyming nature of the film's conclusion further suggests this may be the case. Unfortunately, the unclarity of the writing leaves this merely a possibility and one that isn't developed enough to have much significance. It's never really clear what Winters is trying to suggest or if she knows herself. From what I understand, she wrote the script as they went along. That explains a lot. The possibility is also suggested that Patient X is the real Janelle Wethers. There are a lot of suggestions in ClownStrophobia, but nothing more.

Clarity is not always necessary in a movie. David Lynch's recent films, especially INLAND EMPIRE, have been models of unclarity. They would have been weakened by clarity, in fact. But if a film's plot elements or intentions are fundamentally unclear, the film must cater to alternative modes of appreciation. Lynch's films have strong emotional appeal and are visually and aurally powerful. Lucio Fulci's The House by the Cemetery, which is another very unclear movie, offers ideas and viscerality. Experiments using weak narratives or no scripts at all have their place, and that place is to give space to raw performance or visual experimentation. ClownStrophobia does not have performers, save for Ebru Yonak, who can carry raw, improvisational performance. Nor are the characters other than Patient X given any material to create powerful performances. Many lines, such as "Don't you touch him!" and "Don't say that!" are heavily repeated. The only other performance to stand out is, for its camp value, Rocco George's turn as Dr. Boyd. Moreover, the visuals in ClownStrophobia are not only mundane, but frequently incompetent, as when the tops of heads are removed by the frame and some characters linger half out of frame. It does offer gorey deaths but with nowhere near the creativity of Fulci or H.G. Lewis. Rather they resemble the kills in Mardi Gras Massacre. ClownStrophobia's main focus is clearly the web of mysteries Winters tries to weave and unfortunately this web is constructed too lazily to make an enjoyable movie.