Disquiet (2023)

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Posted By: brian@brianschell.com February 27, 2023

Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone

From the publisher- Brace yourself for a twisted, spine-tingling thriller with DISQUIET, now streaming on Redbox. Jonathan Rhys Meyers stars as a patient who wakes to discover he is trapped in an abandoned hospital by mysterious and sinister forces that have no intention of letting him leave. Don’t miss out on this must-see movie: Stream DISQUIET instantly on Redbox On Demand today. Rated R. From Paramount Pictures.

This one pulls you along wondering what’s going on and trying to figure it out along with the main character. It’s well filmed, well acted, looks good, and was overall entertaining.

Synopsis

We hear Sam tell us that “Life is all about choices.” He says that he’s married to Sarah, and they have a baby on the way. Then Sam has a really bad car accident and they take him to the hospital. Credits roll.

Sam wakes up in a hospital bed, alone in a hospital room, attached to a monitor. He presses the call button, but no one calls. He looks over at the old man in the next bed, and he’s suddenly gone. The old man jumps him and they fight; Sam runs out into the hallway yelling for help, but no one comes. They both fight really hard for a couple of hospital patients. Eventually, Sam stabs the old man a dozen or so times with a scalpel. When he looks again, the body is gone. He goes back to the room and finds the old man back in his bed as if nothing had happened.

He checks his phone and sees that his line has been disconnected. He quickly puts his clothes on. When the nurse finally shows up, there’s no other patient in the room with Sam. He goes down to the lobby and is again pursued by the crazy man.

Monica is in the hospital for a boob job. They put her under the anesthetic, and she hallucinates the doctor and nurse as people with messed-up faces. She wakes up surrounded by three bloody women wrapped in bandages. Sam rushes in when she screams, and he sees them too. Sam and Monica run away. “We need to get out of here,” Sam warns.

There are no nurses and no doctors in this hospital. No people at all. “It’s a zombie apocalypse, isn’t it?” Monica asks. They find Carter handcuffed to a gurney. He says that a cop shot him in the back, but that he’s OK. They spot the three bloody mean-girls in the hallway. Maybe they are zombies.

Another man with a messed-up face warns Sam that he can’t go anywhere. He gets knocked out and dreams of Sarah telling him he’s going to grow into a crazy old man with wild hair and long fingernails. She nags at him about texting while driving, and that’s how he got into the accident in the first place.

Once again, Sam wakes up in a hospital bed. Someone with a gun, a policeman, asks if Sam’s one of the ones trying to keep him in this place. Since the cop has a face, he decides to trust him. The cop tells Sam to look out a window; there’s nothing outside. Nothing at all. We get a flashback to the cop at the convenience store- the clerk says he’s being robbed. He points his gun at Carter, but Carter points at another guy in the store. The policeman in Sam’s room vanishes.

Sam comes across Virgil, an older man in a wheelchair. He seems reasonable, so the two of them head to the roof hoping to get a cell signal. They run into Lily, a doctor with a wrench, and she wants to go downstairs. The orderly insists that Sam shouldn’t be with Lily, and he warns them not to go downstairs. Then the orderly makes off with Virgil. Before long, Sam winds up alone in the elevator, once again with the crazy old man on the roof.

Monica catches up to Sam and tells him that there’s no way out. They’re in the lobby, but there’s literally no exit. Lily shows up in the elevator with the orderly’s head. They catch Frank the policeman trying to shoot out a window with no luck. Carter shows up as well and he and Frank argue about who shot whom.

The group discusses possibilities. Are they all drugged? Are they all dead? Frank shoots Carter and demands that Lily show them how she came to work. Something in the elevator grabs Frank and drags him away. Finally, they get in the other elevator and go down, which is what Lily’s been pushing for all along.

They reach the lowest level and Monica wants to check out the morgue, assuming they’re all really dead. Monica unwraps her bandages, and we see that she has no scars from her surgery. Suddenly, all the dead people sit up. Frank returns, and all the dead people are dead again. Frank shows them that his gunshot wound is gone.

Lily takes them to the exit, a red door that seems to have a fire on the other side. Carter runs on, looking much less dead than before, and he and Frank fight some more. Frank ends up shooting Carter a few more times, but Carter’s body soon disappears.

Lily continues to push them toward the red door, but Monica is afraid and won’t go. It soon becomes obvious that Lily isn’t human. Virgil comes out of the elevator, and he insists that there’s another way out on the roof. Monica gets sucked into the red room, but Virgil orders Sam into the elevator with him.

Virgil says that this isn’t Hell, Heaven, or anywhere in-between. “It’s just a hospital, but some have been here a lot longer than others. They don’t want to leave.” They have to get to the other elevator to get to the roof. Sam gets a vision of Sarah with their baby daughter. Sam takes off his bandage, and he’s uninjured. Virgil explains that no one here is dead, but that’s not the same as living. Virgil says he’s just a guide, same as Lily, but they have different purposes.

Sam and Virgil meet a little girl with a burn, and they invite her to go along with them to the roof. She says she doesn’t want to follow “the bad lady.” The crazy old man breaks through into the elevator and attacks Sam once again, but like before, Sam stabs him.

A big scary nurse catches up to Sam and drags him back to his room. Sam gets visions of Sarah and a group of doctors working on his body. Virgil, out of his wheelchair, whacks the nurse with the pipe wrench. Virgil tells Sam that he can live or die, the choice is up to him. Lily shows up and says that Sam should choose death the way Monica and Frank chose it.

Sam gets to the top of the stairs with the little girl, and they go through into the light. We see that in the real hospital, there’s a badly burned little girl with her parents. We also see that Sam is on a ventilator and not looking so good. Sam in the stairway sends Sarah an “I love you too text,” and moves on. In the real world, the text comes through for Sarah.

Commentary

Kevin got really upset with the tube stuck in Sam’s mouth during the hospital scene “That’s not how anything works! That’s not how you do things!” It wasn’t a breathing tube and a feeding tube would have gone up his nose. He was also skeptical about the full bottle of Oxycodone left out on the bedside table. But it makes more sense after a while of watching.

It looks good- the cinematography is really cool. The whole story is a kind of “what is going on” kind of mystery, so the plot doesn’t make much sense as it unfolds. It’s mostly just one weird encounter after another, but eventually, you develop a theory that turns out to be mostly correct.

I figured early on that this was some kind of purgatory, even though Virgil says it isn’t. As soon as Lily said “don’t call me Lilith,” it was pretty obvious that she was up to no good.

Overall, it was good, we both enjoyed it.