Director – Barrett Burgin, Screenplay – Barrett Burgin & Mason D. Davis, Producers – Westin Cross & Matthew Siemens, Photography – Roman Alaivi, Music – Sam Clunie, Additional Visual Effects – Noa Graphics Studio, Production Design – Marcelle Leon. Production Company – M.O. Pictures/Saban Pictures/Burgindie.
Cast
Jyllian Petrie (Psychologist/002), Morgan Gunter (Biochemist/003), Mason D. Davis (Soldier/004), Curt Doussett (Engineer/001), Emily Marie Palmer (Doctor/005), Michael Flynn (The Inventor/000)
Plot
Five people wake up in an underground cryogenic facility. They have no memory of who they are and can only remember that they have qualifications in various fields. As they debate about what to do, tensions rise in the shelter. They are unsure what the state of the world outside is and whether the air above might be poisonous or not. The Engineer who built the shelter is certain The Inventor is alive somewhere, possibly even spying on them. Someone is stealing the meagre supplies of food and tensions rise to the point of violence amongst the group.
Cryo was a feature-length debut for Barrett Burgin who had previously made several short films.
I was immediately intrigued by Cryo from the capsule description where a group of people wake up from cryogenic suspension with amnesia only to find a killer is hunting them. This makes Cryo resemble the Harlan Ellison-scripted Logan’s Run episode Crypt (1977) where six survivors awake from cryogenic suspension to find one of their number is a killer. (A more detailed list of films dealing with cryogenics can be found in my essay Films About Cryogenics and Suspended Animation).
There is a strong hook to the film’s storyline involving variously people waking from cryogenic suspension with their memories blanked; the question of uncertainty about the state of the world outside and whether it might have been destroyed and it be poisonous to go outside; along with tensions that mount among the people confined inside and someone eliminating their numbers. There is also the claim that The Inventor of the vault is still alive and lurking somewhere, and maybe that he or others are secretly spying on them. All of which seems to stir an interesting plot mix.
Survivors in a cryogenic shelter – (l to r) Curt Doussett, Emily Marie Palmer, Morgan Gunter, Mason D. Davis and Jyllian Petrie
The film reaches a twist ending, which is not entirely uninteresting, but goes off at a bizarre left field where none of the abovementioned issues are exactly relevant. The main problem with this that it is a good premise being handled by people without quite enough skill to do the job justice. Rather than become a taut thriller that edges around questions of what is outside, what is going on or who is killing people, the script muddles about without anybody being able to draw out its tensions and confrontations. The ending should have come as a big M.Night Shyamalan-esque Conceptual Breakthrough twist but is a damp squib of a non-event.
The film is clearly shot on a low-budget. The cryogenic laboratory looks decidedly low-tech – no more than the dingy and dimly lit brick-walled basement of a building and nothing at all like the laboratory you would assume a cryogenic testing facility to look like. I also have some issues with the way the script tosses around terms like ‘entropy’ and ‘Darwinism’ without any apparent understanding of their meaning.
