Alive (2018)
Latlight verdictWatchable
- Year2018
- GenreHorror, Thriller
- DirectorRob Grant
- StarringThomas Cocquerel, Camille Stopps, Angus Macfadyen
Alive 2018
My review
Alive is a small, grim Canadian horror film from director Rob Grant, and it is worth sticking with for the ending. Two badly injured patients wake up in an abandoned hospital with no idea how they got there, looked after by a strange old caretaker (Angus Macfadyen) who seems to enjoy their pain a little too much. Most of the film is claustrophobic and brutal, and the middle drags in places, but the ending is great and completely unexpected: I really did not see it coming, and it makes you rethink everything you have just watched. Read nothing about it before you press play. Watchable.
Alive and the Montreal experiments
Alive is not based on a true story, and I will not spoil its ending here. But its closest real match is chilling. In the 1950s and 60s, at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, the psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron ran experiments partly funded by the CIA's secret MKUltra programme. Patients who came in for anxiety or depression were put into drug-induced sleep for weeks, given massive electroshocks and played recorded messages on a loop, in an attempt to wipe their memories and "rebuild" them. Many woke up unable to remember their own lives. Years later, survivors sued, and Canada paid compensation to some of them.
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