Director/Screenplay – Michael Winnick, Producer – Steven Paul, Photography – Adam Sliwinski & Mel Ward, Music – Rich Walters, Visual Effects Supervisor – Mike Leeming, Special Effects Supervisor – Brant McIlroy, Production Design – Patrick Acuna. Production Company – SP Media Group/Government Island.
Cast
Jonathan Rhys Meyers (Sam), Rachelle Goulding (Lily), Elyse Levesque (Monica), Garry Chalk (Virgil), Lochlyn Munro (Frank), Anita Brown (Sarah), Trezzo Mahoro (Carter), Bradley Stryker (Gaunt Man)
Plot
Sam wakes up in hospital following a car crash. He is immediately attacked by a fellow patient. As he flees through the hospital, looking for an exit, what he experiences seems to blur between real and hallucination. Sam is joined by others including Monica who has just woken from plastic surgery; the doctor Lily; the wheelchair ridden Virgil; the police officer Frank; and Carter, the suspect that Frank shot in a convenience store robbery. As Sam tries to find what has happened and why he cannot seem to leave the hospital or call out, dark forces within come to attack them.
Disquiet was the eighth film for director Michael Winnick. Winnick has entered into genre material a number of times before with Deuces (2001), the reality-bending Shadow Puppets (2007), The Better Half (2015) about a woman who becomes two personalities, and the horror film Malicious (2018), as well as having made the non-genre likes of Guns, Girls and Gambling (2012), Code of Honor (2016) and Dark Asset (2022).
Disquiet falls into the genre for Medical Horrors and a sub-genre of these about haunted or sinister happenings in hospitals – see the likes of The Kingdom (1994), Autopsy (2008), A Cure for Wellness (2016), The Void (2016), Nails (2017), Yummy (2019) and The Power (2021). There is even a sub-genre among these for strange hospitals where reality is in a state of flux and/or the patients seem to have entered into the afterlife – see Sublime (2007), Dark Floors (2008), Convergence (2015), Fractured (2019) and Antidote (2021). In many ways, the characters waking up in a strange place and trying to figure out what is going on is not dissimilar to Winnick’s earlier film Shadow Puppets.
It is not particularly hard to work out that Disquiet is another deathdream film. This is a name I have given to a genre that has been around ever since Outward Bound (1930) and An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1961) and a great many films since that feature a similar such twist ending where bizarre occurrences are suddenly revealed to be the experiences of a person in the moments before dying. (See Deathdream films for a more detailed listing of these). Nowadays the deathdream twist has become something of a cliché.
Jonathan Rhys Meyers in a strange netherworld hospital
Soon into the Disquiet, things get a little bit ridiculous. There’s the sight of Jonathan Rhys Meyers waking up in a hospital bed and being attacked and then pursued by his geriatric neighbour (Bradley Stryker) who even manages to get into the emergency hatch above the elevator in order to burst through. Or the scenes where Elyse Levesque wakes up from a plastic surgery operation and is pursued by three zombified strumpets with very fake scars and bandages wrapped sufficiently to cover the naughty bits, who then start pursuing her by scuttling along the ceiling.
The fact that Disquiet is a deathdream all gets a bit obvious. There’s the wheelchair character called Virgil (Garry Chalk) – the Roman poet Virgil who was the principal guide through the afterlife in Dante’s Inferno (c1321). And even more crashingly obvious when it comes to the character of Lily (Rachelle Goulding) who tosses off lines like “Don’t call me Lilith – I hate that name.” The rest of the film is a tedious array of Reality and Illusion games and pop-up jumps conducted with no real sophistication.
