INOPERABLE (2017)

Studio:       Cinedigm
Director:    Christopher Lawrence Chapman
Writer:       Christopher Lawrence Chapman, Jeff Miller
Producer:  Christopher Lawrence Chapman, Jeff Miller, Giorgio Daveed
Stars:     Danielle Harris, Jeff Denton, Katie Keene, Crystal Cordero, Chris Hahn, Philip Schene, Michelle Marin, Cher Hubsher, Jared Gopman, Brittni Amber Lombardo

Review Score:

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Summary:

Inexplicably trapped in a repeating time loop, a young woman must find a way to escape a seemingly sinister hospital.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

After suffering head injuries in a massive vehicular pileup while evacuating a Florida island, 30-year-old nursing student Amy Barrett is admitted to Bay General Hospital. As Amy fades in and out of consciousness, a female doctor and an orderly named William discuss Hurricane Sybil, an oncoming category five storm that threatens to shut down the facility.

Amy flashes back to sitting in a traffic jam before the crash. On the car in front of her is a bumper sticker for the Sybil High School Hurricanes.

Amy wakes up to find the hospital largely deserted. Amy gets dressed, discovers a worried voicemail from her mother on her cellphone, and explores the halls.

Amy finds a psychiatrist interviewing young patient Ophelia, who clutches a stuffed elephant toy. Amy discovers that Ophelia and the psychiatrist, as well as a priest and other hospital staff, are unable to see Amy. Amy eventually collapses.

Amy briefly flashes back to the traffic jam before reawakening back in her hospital bed. When Amy explores the building this time, two nurses named Tara and Stephanie instruct Amy to return to her room. Suspicious, Amy flees from the nurses.

Amy finds surgeons cutting open a patient and removing his insides. Meanwhile, Ophelia roams the halls.

Amy next encounters a deputy named Ryan with Jen Ardsen, a witness Ryan was escorting to the hospital when the storm hit, sitting in the lobby. The psychiatrist interrupts a confused conversation between Amy, Ryan, and Jen. Identifying Ryan and Jen as Amy’s imaginary friends, the psychiatrist begins chasing all three of them.

A doctor and nurse capture Ryan. Amy flees, but collapses after suffering another nosebleed.

Following another flashback to the traffic jam, Amy wakes in the hospital once more. This time, Amy sneaks past the staff as well as Ophelia to regroup with Ryan and Jen.

Ryan remembers that he and Jen have been through this same experience before, just as Amy has. Ryan warns that Amy cannot die inside the hospital or else she will have to stay there forever. Ryan theorizes that when the hurricane passed over nearby Fort Miller, a secret government test facility, the storm somehow broke timelines and woke the building.

Amy, Ryan, and Jen find another patient being tortured during a medical procedure. Ryan ends up captured. Jen tells Amy that she has to escape with Ryan because the two of them entered the hospital together. Jen and Amy find a gutted patient lying dead in a hallway.

While hiding in a vent, Jen oddly mentions mascara and modeling to Amy. The two women exit into a room full of body parts. Jen is captured. Amy collapses again.

In her next traffic jam flashback, Amy tries calling 911 to report being trapped at Bay General Hospital. The call cuts out as Amy reawakens in the building.

Jen finds Amy. A phone call from Ryan tells Jen that they need to start over from the beginning. Jen and Amy’s subsequent search for Ryan ends when they find him lobotomized. The two nurses capture Jen while Amy flees. Amy collapses.

The cycle resets. Amy encounters Ophelia, runs from the nurses, and finds both Ryan and Jen being tortured. Ophelia passes by as Amy collapses.

In the next cycle, Amy locates Ryan, but he doesn’t initially recognize her. Eventually, they conclude that they were in the same pileup, although Ryan tells Amy it was four years ago for him. Ryan again theorizes that the storm over Fort Miller, where a quantum particle lab was conducting experiments in paradoxical time anomalies, mixed up multiple timelines and created the recurring loop. The hospital staff attacks, forcing Amy to flee until she finally collapses.

Over the course of several more cycles, Ophelia brings her elephant doll to Amy each time Amy collapses. Ryan tells Amy to look for any repeating numbers that could be a clue on how to escape. A voicemail from Amy’s mother repeats that Amy had a sister who died. Ryan and Amy find a letter from Sybil High School reminding Amy to renew her alumni membership. Ryan and Jen continue getting killed. The staff continues chasing Amy.

In a flashback to the traffic jam, Amy calls 911 to report a psychotic killer on the loose at Bay General Hospital. When she reawakens in the building, Amy tells Ryan that she noticed the numbers 945 on her car radio in the flashback. Ryan tells Amy that Room 945 is in the infectious disease section past the psych ward. Ryan explains he cannot go through the psych ward because Jen’s soul is trapped there in a state of permanent torture. When Ryan ends up captured, he realizes the 945 numbers led to a trap. Ophelia returns to Amy as Amy collapses.

In her next flashback, Amy notes the numbers 113 on the license plate of the car in front of hers. Back in the hospital, Amy kills a nurse, spots Ophelia, and flees from the staff.

Amy finds Ryan being forced to watch Jen’s torture. Amy rescues them both. Hospital staff pursues the trio to Room 113. There, Ryan, Jen, and Amy open the closet to escape into a bright light.

Amy wakes in the hospital to find she is being discharged. With the hurricane having passed, a car takes Amy home to her mother. Amy’s mother mentions Amy being haunted by the death of her sister Ophelia, and gives Ophelia’s elephant doll to Amy.

A flashback shows Ophelia being committed to Bay General for psychiatric treatment. In a session with the psychiatrist, Ophelia discusses how her mom died and she now lives with her stepmother and half-sister Amy. Ophelia mentions that she misses Amy, who has been in and out of mental institutions. Having been at the facility for six months with no improvement, the psychiatrist suggests a surgical treatment for Ophelia. Ophelia instead commits suicide by overdosing on pills.

Amy comes out of this vision to find herself back in the hospital. Amy pulls out a magazine that shows Ryan and Jen as models in advertisements that she imagined as real. Amy recovers a scalpel and goes on a killing spree that starts with William the orderly, revealing that Amy was the psychotic murderer who terrorized the hospital, and her entire ordeal was a delusional fantasy.

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Review:

Amy Barrett found herself stuck in a traffic jam of evacuating cars when a deadly hurricane threatened to drown the Florida coast.  Suffering head trauma during a subsequent pileup, Amy now finds herself stuck in a haunting hospital whose skeletal staff seemingly has a sinister agenda.

For unknown reasons she can’t begin to guess, Amy somehow became caught in a nightmarish loop of repeating events bouncing her between the traffic jam and the hospital.  Another young woman clutching a stuffed animal shows up in strange places.  Doctors and nurses alternately attempt to subject Amy to painful medical procedures or cannot see Amy at all.  Details are different with each reset, though scant clues only confuse Amy more.

Pieces of a bigger picture begin falling into place when Amy meets Ryan and Jen, who are trapped in a similar cycle of their own.  The hurricane, the hospital, and the shadowy figures stalking its halls have to be connected.  And Amy, Ryan, and Jen must uncover that connection if they are to have any hope of returning to reality alive.

“Inoperable” sounds similar to “Happy Death Day” (review here) or “Groundhog Day,” and it is, except Amy isn’t caught in a perfectly repeating pattern.  Sometimes Jen and Ryan don’t immediately recognize her.  Sometimes Jen and Ryan are in the middle of being murdered.  With no consistent ‘rules’ to Amy’s situation, “Inoperable” has a hard time engaging as a mystery because the film focuses on confounding through irrelevant complexity instead of providing pieces a viewer could use to play along.

When “Happy Death Day” arrives at its ending, it comes with an “aha!” wrap-up where you realize how the film cleverly hid clues in plain sight all along.  When “Inoperable” unveils its disappointingly dippy twist, a majority of minutes leading up to that point are retroactively revealed to have been a distracting waste of time.  The way its mystery unspools, “Happy Death Day’s” frustration becomes fun.  With “Inoperable,” it’s just frustrating.

Breadcrumbs littered here and there include oddly timed mentions of mascara and magazine modeling (which actually do come into play later) amidst all of the murder.  Ryan and Amy routinely hunt for repeating numbers that might point to a way out.  Some claptrap about haywire experiments at a secret research facility adds another log to the “what’s really going on?” fire.  Then there are recurring characters like the girl and her stuffed animal who appear with no noticeable rhyme or reason.

“Inoperable” alters everything so often, clues can’t connect to create a satisfyingly mind-bending experience.  Red herrings work when they divert attention from something specific.  When misdirection exists without a true path somewhere in the middle, all a movie has is ultimately inconsequential noise.  “Inoperable” learned the wrong lesson from “Lost” about instilling suspense and made the same mistake of not thinking through its threads beforehand.

The movie makes some of the right moves for a low-budget indie thriller, namely tapping KNB co-founder Robert Kurtzman for FX duty while casting fan-favorite actress Danielle Harris as Amy.  The good news for her fans is that Harris features in almost every scene, eating up an ample amount of screen time.  The bad news is her engagement with the role leans closer to her disinterested performances in forgotten fare like “Hallows’ Eve” (review here) or “Camp Dread” (review here) than one of the “Hatchet” or “Halloween” movies.

Danielle Harris fans tend to forgive quite a bit when it comes to her B-movies though, and they are required to forgive quite a bit here.  “Inoperable” probably looked like an intriguing story in the script stage, but the final film shows the production’s hamstringing limitations.

Nearly none of the amateur actors are believable in their portrayed professions.  The man playing a priest seems to have done his research from one “Father Dowling Mysteries” rerun.  The person playing the psychiatrist looks like he has never seen a real doctor conduct a therapy session before.  Running, of which there is A LOT in this movie, and physical fights are kneecapped by tight hallways and actors inexperienced with stunt work.  As a result, many of their movements read like half-speed pantomime.

“Inoperable” undoubtedly does the best it can with what little it has.  The large location lends a value that many micro-movies would kill to have as a playground, and a Steadicam that rarely stops gliding puts a pulse into the imagery’s energy.  Effort is evident everywhere.  “Inoperable” simply can’t sell itself as an immersive fantasy because more than the story asks for suspension of disbelief.  The acting, the setting, and nearly everything else asks too, and that kind of demand is more than an average audience can handle.

Review Score:  45

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