NEW YORK MOVIE JOURNAL (Sept.-Oct. 2019)

[Chris Knipp]

THE DEAD CENTER (Billy Senese 2019). I was intrigued by the presence e of ace indie director Shane Carruth's (Primer, Upstream Color), here playing a lead outside his own filmography; he does so nicely. He's cast as a psychiatrist drawn into treating a man formerly a body-bagged suicide "John Doe" (Jeremy Childs) who violently revives and winds up catatonic in the hospital psych ward. This tricky patient, oscillating between pathetic and menacing, seems either a zombie or possessed by a malevolent spirit. Alternately motionless or causing deaths all around him, he superficially resembles the creepy guy in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's much cooler film Cure. Scary and momentarily disturbing without having an original plot, The Dead Center lacks the subtlety of the Japanese film, but it moves right along and is reputedly is a major step forward from Senese's first film. Watched at Cinema Village Oct. 14, 2019. Metascore: 63.