Financial troubles, job stress, and a fraught dwelling life can be sufficient to push anybody to the sting, however as Gordon Fleming (Westworld’s Peter Mullan) discovers, there’s nothing like a (in all probability haunted) deserted psychiatric hospital to essentially flip the screws.

That’s the place we discover Gordon in the beginning of director Brad Anderson’s Session 9, a low-budget nail-biter that got here out in 2001 however has a timeless really feel, even with the presence of early-2000s TV star David Caruso, immortalized endlessly in you-know-which meme involving sun shades. (Anderson, who has steadily labored in films and TV since, acquired his most up-to-date credit score directing an episode of James Gunn’s Peacemaker.) It’s true that plenty of the heavy atmospheric lifting comes ready-made with the movie’s setting—the hulking Danvers State Hospital, also referred to as the “Danvers Lunatic Asylum”—however all that creepy abandonment porn would solely go thus far, if not for the nuances of character growth and tension-building within the script by Anderson and Stephen Gevedon.

“Holy shit, look at this,” Phil (David Caruso) tells Gordon as they drive as much as the hospital for the primary time, decided to win a much-needed contract for his or her asbestos-removal enterprise. It looks like the fitting response. Not solely is Danvers an intimidating construction, its empty home windows and—as soon as they get a glance inside— peeling paint, flooded flooring, and left-behind medical gear (together with different proof of the troubled lives that when dwelled there) counsel deep psychic wounds lingering inside its partitions, very similar to the cancer-causing materials the boys are there to handle. There’s poison within the air in additional methods than one, and it positive doesn’t really feel like a spot of therapeutic. And as Gordon, Phil, and the remainder of the staff (Hank, performed by Josh Lucas; Jeff, Gordon’s nephew, performed by Brendan Sexton III; and Mike, performed by co-writer Gevedon) quickly discover out, its darkish historical past nonetheless has the ability to reverberate into the current.

No horror-movie fan may watch Session 9 with out choosing up its references to The Shining—past the plain Very Bad Place Filled With Very Bad Energy, there are little particulars, like the truth that Gordon’s spouse is known as Wendy—and that makes the ending much less of a shock than maybe Anderson supposed. Still, the trail to that ending nonetheless manages to take some surprising twists. Of course, the decrepit asylum is a horror trope at this level, notably favored by found-footage films in addition to TV reveals about “real” ghost hunters. That’s why it’s so satisfying that Session 9 strives to convey heft to its story past its admittedly spooky as hell backdrop.

Gordon—who’s a brand new father, so you may add “sleep-deprived” to his checklist of woes—is the primary character, however most everybody will get fleshed out to satisfying impact. Phil is Gordon’s finest good friend, however they don’t at all times agree; that is foreshadowed early on when Phil estimates the clean-up job will take at the least three weeks, and Gordon says two. (Later, Gordon chases down the Danvers head of public works and insists that they will get the job completed in one week—a timetable that nets them the gig but in addition ratchets up the stress that comes with a loudly ticking clock.) Phil and Hank have beef because of Phil’s ex dumping him for the cocky Hank; Jeff’s inexperience could also be exasperating at instances, however he genuinely needs to do job for his uncle; and Mike has fallen into this line of labor after dropping out of regulation college, one thing he’s just lately come to remorse. We don’t study every thing about them, however there aren’t any inventory characters among the many primary solid. The performances really feel lived-in, and there’s a familiarity between the boys that makes their shit-talking periods, which may teeter on the road between joking and loathing, come throughout as genuine.

Less dynamic are the safety guard and Danvers metropolis official characters, who seem onscreen largely to unload backstory on the hospital—nevertheless it’s much-needed data for the viewers. You’re already uneasy simply wanting on the place, and then you study “the prefrontal lobotomy was perfected here at Danvers.” (Foreshadowing alert!) Beyond that, Session 9 does take time to debate the psychiatric strategies that will have made Danvers such an sad dwelling for its hundreds of sufferers. Mike, particularly, has an curiosity in Danvers lore, which will increase as soon as he discovers a field marked “evidence” within the basement; it’s full of reel-to-reel tapes chronicling the remedy periods of a affected person with an apparently homicidal variant of Dissociative Identity Disorder. Soon he turns into obsessive about slipping away from his duties so he can hearken to them, and the eerily time-warped sounds of “Mary” and her physician change into a key a part of the film’s unsettling soundscape.

At concerning the three-fourths mark, Session 9 leaps from slow-burn unease— one thing is festering, however you may’t fairly put your finger on it—to a rapid-fire gorefest during which every thing you’ve simply seen is completely defined. It brings a tidy however extremely grim finish to the story, however there’s no sense of catharsis for anybody, least of all of the viewers. What you do take away from Session 9, even 20-plus years later, is the sensation that whereas sure places could also be predisposed to facilitating evil, the susceptible should encounter it regardless of the place they go.

Session 9 is now streaming on Shudder.

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