Addiction is a complicated thing to write about sensitively. It can make you do monstrous things, and so it’s all too easy to make the addict the villain of any story simply because they are continuously fighting their own demons. From the outside this can appear one-sided, with inexplicable acts painting a potentially misleading picture. It’s far simpler to paint morality as black and white than to show the truth. While by no means perfect, the horror genre has proven to be one of the best suited to approaching the subject of addiction with sensitivity while maintaining the ability to portray what makes it so horrific. Horror is the one place where addiction, not the addict, can be made the monster. The uncomfortable truth of the matter is the only winner of that situation is the vice—everyone else is either victim or collateral damage.
2023’s Chattanooga Film Festival has been full of surprisingly heartfelt approaches to some of life’s more challenging and underdiscussed issues. Perhaps the biggest surprise to me thus far has been SUBJECT. The story of a man with the chance to get his prison sentence commuted if he observes and reports on an undisclosed subject for the government, it’s an occasionally claustrophobic approach to introspection and facing one’s own demons. Willem’s (Stephen Phillips) only interactions are either the intrusive questions of the staff member monitoring him at random intervals or his own thoughts when he starts to see the Subject (Joey Lai) on the other side of what he thinks is a two-way mirror. Written by Vincent Befi and directed by Tristan Barr, SUBJECT is a feat of minimalism. How Willem came to be arrested and the tension in his personal life is revealed to us only in pieces via dreams or memories he actively seeks to suppress. As a result, much of how we receive and interpret the story being told is left in our hands to interpret.
The passage of time is almost immediately called into question thanks to the confining environment. We have just as little idea of how long Willem has been in the room monitoring his situation as he does. Could be a matter of days. Could be months. What matters is not the time, but the descent. The more he is left alone, the more he tries not to think. The more that gets revealed, the more we have to confront our own feelings about Willem and his situation.
With so much left up for audience interpretation and so many unanswered questions this should by all means be a difficult film to pull off. Why is he chosen by the government to do these observations? How deep do their secrets go? How deep do his? Where does the line of forgivable darkness get crossed?
SUBJECT is successful in balancing so much mystery thanks in part to Stephen Phillips’ raw performance of Willem. It takes a unique ability to be able to portray an unlikeable character still able to pull genuine sympathy from the audience, and Willem is a prime example of how to make it work.
Where viewers ultimately fall on the sympathy spectrum is entirely up to them; there are enough crumbs in the main character’s dreams and memories for an argument to be made in almost any direction. SUBJECT is special because it seems to offer so much with so little presented, pulling us just as quickly and deeply into the madness as the main character and asking us to choose our own path out again. Who do we trust? Is this a punishment? Therapy? Something else altogether?
You can decide for yourself when SUBJECT comes to Screambox on August 22, 2023.
Tags: Addiction, Cecilia Low, Chattanooga Film Festival, Gaby Seow, Horror, Joey Lai, Matthew Connell, Nathan Barrow, Scarlett Walker, Screambox, Stephen Phillips, Subject, Tristan Barr, Vincent Befi
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