Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		2.5

The Facility Blu-ray Movie Review

Trial and error.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 30, 2014

The British are known for their stiff upper lips and understated and reserved manners, all aspects which may make their attempts to create what Americans would consider typical horror films a challenge. That may be at least one of the reasons the 2012 English entry The Facility never quite manages to scare up much more than a slightly ominous mood and a minor jolt or two as it depicts the tribulations of a small group of people who have signed up to partake in a clinical trial of a new experimental drug called Pro9, in return for which they’ll receive a handsome payday. This may seem like an unlikely premise for a horror film, but as a guy who actually did this very thing in college, subjecting myself to being injected with some sort of faux flu bug which elevated my temperature to over 100 degrees while a tube was inserted up through my nose and down my throat into my stomach so that my gastric output could be measured (I’m not joking), I can vouch for the fact that clinical trials are often gruesome affairs, albeit supposedly unintentionally. The Facility tries to up the ante by presenting a cross section of various types and cultures in the applicant pool, but writer-director Ian Clark gives the audience types rather than characters (something only highlighted by the film’s conceit of introducing each of the major patients with subtitles indicating their names and stations in life, as is shown in some of the screenshots accompanying this review), something that deprives the film of any emotional connection to the people in peril. When that shortcoming is added to the fact that the reason behind the clinical trial is never adequately explained (something that is really essential to trying to understand why all the mayhem happens), and a rather odd, uninvolving ending, The Facility may be long on mood but awfully short on actual frights.

Ironically, The Facility owes a bit of that mood, and maybe even a tad of its concept, to a British horror film that did deliver on its premise, 28 Days Later. As with Danny Boyle’s 2002 horror film, there’s an almost viral quality to how Pro9 seems to work, and also like the former film, there’s a claustrophobic setting that pits a small band of focal characters against an “enemy” that has infected some of them from within. But The Facility never truly capitalizes on its premise the way it might have, and in fact (perhaps because of budget limitations) cheats the audience on exactly what havoc is wreaked on these individuals once the drug takes hold of them.

The main focal character is college student Adam (Aneurin Barnard), who is having a hard time finding the Limebrook Medical Clinic. Once he does get there, he finds himself part of a secretive clinical trial and he meets the other patients who have signed up to be injected daily with Pro9 over the course of the next two weeks. The supervisor physician, Dr. Mansell (Chris Larkin), lays out some of the rules of the road, which include no strenuous physical activity and no leaving the premises. As the first day gets underway, each of the participants is called down to the laboratory at different intervals to undergo their initial exams and injections.

While there are a bunch of “types” in this motley crew, Clark does precious little to develop them beyond mere labels. This is evident right off the bat when the shy, somewhat nervous Arif (Amit Shah) asks the good doctor if he can get paid up front, which the doctor informs him isn’t possible. It seems like there’s some potentially interesting subtext here, but it’s never really followed up on, something Clark does over and over again with a variety of the other characters, which include everyone from a journalist named Katie (Nia Roberts) to a kind of hormonal jock named Jed (Oliver Coleman) to a homeless guy named Morty (Steve Evets) who makes these clinical trials his “job”. All of these characters have nice little quirks, but they’re treated as two dimensional cardboard cutout figures here, not flesh and blood human beings.

Things start going off the deep end overnight when two of the characters start undergoing radical behavior changes and, ultimately, physical metamorphoses. But again Clark cheats the audience. The first “outbreak” is handled so discursively that it’s actually hard to figure out what’s actually going on, something that makes another character’s reaction of uncontrolled vomiting almost funny. The remaining characters encounter one of the only explicit gory elements in the entire film, and a hackneyed but effective shock moment when another minor character blasts up against a glass door unexpectedly, but that’s about it for the actual scares in The Facility.

There’s at least a modicum of suspense with regard to who is going to be the next character to undergo the transformation, as well as a certain level of tension whipped up by the fact that some of the characters may have been given placebos. But The Facility simply never works up much of a head of steam. This becomes all too apparent in the film’s closing moments, when a slew of carnage ensues (most of it not seen very clearly), after which a series of text cards goes into some detail about the upshot of the botched clinical trials. Is Clark really hoping that The Facility would act as an indictment of these techniques, or of Big Pharma as an industry? That seems to be the case, for the film in this sequence as well as its nonstop use of titles wants to pretend to be a quasi-documentary. It at least has the good sense not to go the “found footage” route, but The Facility ironically ends up being “lost” footage for the most part.

The Facility Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Facility is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Cinedigm with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.35:1. This digitally shot feature has a curiously bland appearance a lot of the time, one which deals both with overblown whites and brighter color gradients in the opening, fluorescently lit, sequences but then goes the opposite route for the bulk of the film which takes place in quite dark (and often noise littered) nighttime environments. While the brighter lit moments offer reasonable sharpness and detail, a lot of the latter two thirds of the film is swathed in such murky shadow detail that it's often quite difficult to make out exactly what's happening. Colors are decent if not overwhelmingly vivid and aside from the admittedly minimal noise issues, there are no other artifacts to cause concern.

The Facility Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Perhaps surprisingly, there's not a whale of a lot of difference between the included DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mixes. The 5.1 mix does open up a nice low end that is quite effective in a couple of jump cuts (the boom as the character crashes into, and ultimately through, a glass door is much more present sounding in the 5.1 mix). But the sound design here is not overly ambitious, so the 2.0 mix actually suffices quite well. Fidelity is just fine on both of these tracks, and neither has any issues to report.

The Facility Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

There are no supplements on this Blu-ray disc.

The Facility Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Facility has an interesting enough premise and some nicely diverse characters, but Clark simply doesn't seem to know how to properly develop things. The film is quite nicely shot and edited, with a high level of craftsmanship for such a minimally budgeted effort, but there are simply no major scares here, something that a larger budget may have facilitated with regard to more alarming make up effects. The cast is quite good in the uniformly underwritten roles, but this is probably one facility few horror fans are going to want to check into.