OPEN GRAVE (2013)

Studio:       Cinedigm
Director:    Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego
Writer:       Eddie Borey, Chris Borey
Producer:  William Green, Aaron L. Ginsburg, Michael B. Wunderman
Stars:     Sharlto Copley, Thomas Kretschmann, Josie Ho, Joseph Morgan, Erin Richards, Max Wrottesley

Review Score:

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Summary:

Six amnesiacs wake at an isolated cabin surrounded by corpses and a mass grave with no recollection of who they are.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

An unknown man wakes with amnesia in an open grave filled with corpses. A mute Asian woman known only as Brown Eyes throws down a rope, allowing John Doe to climb out of the pit. John makes his way to a cabin in the woods and finds an additional four people with amnesia. Discovery of their driver’s licenses and passports reveals their names to be Nathan, Lukas, Sharon, and Michael. Everyone is distrustful of one another while they work to determine the conditions of their situation.

John finds a calendar with April 18th circled. Only two days away, he realizes that the date is an important milestone. John also begins having memory flashes that indicate he may have hurt people in the past. Investigating the perimeter reveals dead bodies tied to trees. Nathan realizes that he is fluent in Latin, French, and Italian. Michael excels at handling guns.

Members of the group find Brown Eyes feeding a ravenous woman chained in a shack. More infected and zombified humans are eventually found in makeshift cells around the property.

In the morning, Michael stays at the house with Brown Eyes while the others search the surrounding woods. They find more bodies as well as two cars hidden under camouflage. Michael follows the sound of screaming to a man trapped in a barbed wire fence outside. The man kills Michael.

John and Sharon drive one of the cars down an unpaved path and find an abandoned building. A boy hides inside and refuses to let the two of them in. The boy identifies John as a man named Jonah.

Back at the cabin, Lukas begins growing increasingly ill. Nathan finds his glasses outside the makeshift cells and starts recalling a medical research project that experimented on humans infected by a plague. Lukas finds a camera with footage of Jonah performing experimental treatments on the subjects, including Lukas.

On their drive back to the cabin, Jonah and Sharon uncover more infected, but realize that the zombies are warded off by dead corpses. When they return, Lukas shows Sharon the video and forces Jonah back into the body pit at gunpoint.

Lukas’ behavior grows more erratic. He runs away after attacking Brown Eyes when Sharon comes after him with a shotgun. Brown Eyes helps Jonah out of the pit again. Jonah finds a treatment camp and remembers that he was a doctor working to cure those infected by the plague.

Jonah finds Lukas on the road and subdues him when Lukas tries to escape. Sharon reunites with Nathan, revealed to be Jonah’s brother, at the cabin. When soldiers arrive the next day, Nathan believes he recalls the 18th as the target day for the rescue team to arrive. Nathan goes to the forest for help only to be shot dead by the soldiers.

Sharon and Jonah try escaping from the soldiers together, but Sharon is attacked by an infected human. She and Jonah hide in the open grave. Sharon gives Jonah a note with everything she remembers written on it before he injects them both with the serum while hiding amongst the bodies.

Jonah wakes with amnesia again, but the note falls from his hand. Sharon’s voiceover reveals the note’s contents. Immune to the plague, Sharon identified Brown Eyes as the key to a cure. Brown Eyes rescues John from the pit and the two of them stare at an open expanse of several thousand corpses. The cycle begins again.

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Review:

Missing memory plot devices rarely live up to the premise’s full potential.  In theory, the idea makes for a tantalizing mystery whether it is the full-on memory loss featured in “Modus Anomali” or the more selective amnesia of something like “Identity.”  In practice, the ultimate revelation has a hard time equaling any of the several dozen threads spun in a viewer’s imagination during the course of the runtime.  Sometimes, the script in such a situation just cannot avoid running into a “wait, that’s it?” reaction.

“Open Grave” drops down a similar vertical tunnel of promising starting point, yet so-so big picture.  The fall lands it in that same category of other confused character thrillers that can be regarded as good, though still short of great.

Sharlto Copley is a John Doe who wakes in a rain-soaked pit surrounded by corpses to find himself missing all knowledge of how he got there and who he even is.  A mute woman helps him out of the open grave and into the shelter of a nearby cabin where four other perfect strangers share his plight.  Unsure of whom to trust, the six of them work to determine what their situation is with the hope of finding a way out of it, too.

In addition to the mass grave in the backyard, a perimeter search of the surrounding forest uncovers more bodies tied to trees and trapped in barbed wire fences.  Not all of them are fully dead.  The predicament that the amnesic sextet finds themselves in the middle of soon starts resembling a George A. Romero movie instead of an Agatha Christie novel.

At 105 minutes, “Open Grave” is in the neighborhood of 15 minutes or so too loose to run scot-free from having to answer for ongoing contrivances used to propel the story forward.  A tighter clip would afford less time for the audience to catch up so quickly to noticing every deus ex machina littering the story like so many corpses in the forest.

A character randomly throwing rocks into trees conveniently hits a pair of cars hidden under camouflage netting.  That same character later steps just as randomly on a pair of his old glasses that fell to the forest floor pre-blackout.  Donning the frames triggers a key recollection.

A falling tree blocks the road at precisely the right moment to stop a passing car.  Copley is dropped back into the pit loaded with dozens of bodies, yet falls directly on top of the exposed tattoo from a foggy memory suddenly filling in more blanks.  And not only does he drop his keys at the most inopportune time possible, but the infected person confronted at that moment somehow has the wherewithal to swallow said keys.

Getting away with one or two of these cheats to add drama is excusable, even expected, but “Open Grave” needs one at virtually every scene change.  The whole notion of everyone having amnesia in the first place already stretches willing disbelief thin.  It is a pattern of overreliance on logic leaps that is disappointing for a movie otherwise more initially intriguing than other horror thrillers.

Overlooking such exposed warts enables an improved view of the entertaining epidermis underneath, even if digesting the entirety of “Open Grave” leaves a hunger pang of unfulfilled satisfaction.  The movie’s overall value is improved greatly by superb technical efforts from director of photography Jose David Montero and composer Juan Navazo, not to mention the actors and their director Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego.  In parts, “Open Grave” is nearly too polished cinematically.  Heavy doses of rainstorm lightning flashes and production design that occasionally borders dangerously close to obvious staging almost undoes portions of the false reality.

“Open Grave” might score lower if the genre had stiffer competition filled with more worthwhile alternatives.  As it is, the film still has intrigue to offer, no matter how fleeting it might be once all of the cards are exposed on the table.  The concept is more novel than the complete package is, but there is enough tragedy and desperation on display to keep captivation as a chief player in the guessing game at the movie’s core.

Review Score:  75

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