In short: Breaking Dawn (2004)

Warning: I’m going to at least in part spoil the ending!

Medical student Dawn (Kelly Overton) takes part in a somewhat peculiar test of her medical ability. Given six weeks to treat a patient in a mental institution for the more difficult cases, the students are apparently either succeeding at a treatment or will never be able to finish their studies.

Dawn’s patient is one Don Wake (James Haven), nearly catatonic after he supposedly murdered his mother. Turns out it’s rather difficult to practice the talking cure on a guy who usually doesn’t even acknowledge one’s presence. Increasingly desperate, Dawn secretly lowers Don’s medication, which does indeed wake him up. The first mumblings and later rantings about someone (or something?) named Malachi and a secret conspiracy Don starts spouting very quickly take on a reality of their own for Dawn, as if Don were beaming his delusions right into her brain. Very soon, strange people appear to her, objects appear and disappear and the young woman becomes emotionally fragile and paranoid. Even worse, in her interactions with Don, the power dynamics shift completely, until she’s the one begging for his help.

Yes, to put the spoilers right here, all of what’s happening is indeed going on inside of Dawn’s head, for she’s the actual mental patient of the tale, with Don some sort of spirit (let’s hope he’s not meant to be a sodding angel) come to help her before her brain is forever destroyed via electroconvulsive therapy (which the film treats as if it were a lobotomy). So everything we see that doesn’t make sense is supposed to be metaphorical or an illusion, in theory absolving the script of all responsibility to make sense or play by its own rules.

Of course, if everything’s supposed to be an actual symbol or metaphor, then a film needs to make sure all of these symbols and metaphors actually cohere into some kind of comprehensible meaning. Breaking Dawn manages this about half of the time. That wouldn’t be too bad a quota, if those bits of the film that do cohere were just a little less bland. Dawn, apparently, doesn’t have much of an imagination even in her dream-life, mostly using the kind of kitchen sink psychology metaphors you’d find in a mediocre TV movie, and those not terribly convincingly either. Really, the film simply needed either to be crazier or more thought through.


Visually, director/writer Mark Edwin Robinson never gets above that TV movie level either, not exactly creating much of a mysterious atmosphere with bright lighting and mostly text book – aka boring – framing. It’s certainly not a bad looking film, but not one that ever got my imagination going, either.