Control

A girl is playing with her daughter at the beach. Next she wakes up in a small room tied to a chair with a table in front and a pen on it. The the room goes red, a voice tells her to complete a task. There's a timer in front of her counting down. When she breaks the rules, the room turns blue and the voice threatens her daughter. When she accomplished the task, lighting turns normal, she hears a noise that knocks her out and then she wakes up the next to to complete another task. The idea seems for her to develop her telekinetic skills. One day her husband is in the room and eventually he us used as a motivating factor in the experiments while the woman keeps dreaming about their daughter. After completing the experiments she gets to leave and finds herself in some warehouse. There seem to be other rooms with experiments. When security shows up she gets to put her powers to good use. We also learned what really happened at the beach. The girl now has a choice to make and she makes a surprising choice. Initially I thought Control would be one of those ultra low-budget single character single location movies, but it does have more to offer and I found the story engaging. When the girl goes into god mode, things get super cool. Still low budget. They put the funds to good use and made a movie worth watching.

Given the low ratings I have to give 10 stars. Otherwise the movie is 6 - 6.5. The movie is clearly inspired by the game with the same name. Maybe they didn't credited it because they don't want to be sued for copyright infringement (?), I guess? There's nothing wrong with that but I just wanted to get that out of the way. The movie is pretty solid, considering it had a low budget. I really don't understand what people are even expecting from this movie since they give low ratings most of them. But the movie isn't bad. So keep that in mind when if you want to watch it. The plot of the movie is pretty simple: a women wakes up in a sound-proof room with no means of escape and it's forced to partake in a series of tests that will develop her telekinesis powers. Between the tests we see what appears to be memories of her and her daughter Eve. I don't want to spoil any further so I am going to just say this: it has an open ending. Kinda. We know what happens with the women at the end but we are still left with many questions unanswered and I am not going to asks those questions because that will spoil the ending. I liked the acting, cinematography, sound design although they really drag that song alot. Now that I am thinking about it, maybe the song could be a clue to what's going on... My only complaints are the cheesy hand movements (I guess they used that to make the powers seem more interesting) and the dream-like sections of the movie. They just dragged too much with those. I mean I understand that they didn't want to make a long-feature film but still... The movie would have worked perfectly fine without them. And they really don't add anything to the story. I do recommend this movie. It's clearly not any awards worthy but like I said it's a solid movie. It's not crappy but it's not a masterpiece either. You can give it a watch.

Is this a good movie? It is hard to describe. The pacing ultimately becomes very slow. With dramatic, eerie thriller elements from Cube Zero (2004) and the latter part of the television series Person of Interest with Amy Acker having a similarity with Sara Mitich playing Eileen in Control, this movie has its moments. Also included are sci fi components from Lucy (2014) and the emotionally wrenching scenes like from Reminiscence (2021), and the more boring but stylistically strange We've Forgotten More Than We Ever Knew (2016) as well as the classic horror movie Silent Hill (2006). Somehow the movie feels incomplete with its understandable and cyclical movie style. Emotionally intriguing, but not completely satisfying with somehow a missing and important piece of the movie element omitted for a full-length feature film. Nice attempt but consider the horror movie Dark Water (2005) or 1408 (2007) for a similar edgy but full-storied feature. This movie could have been much, much better as a one-hour television episode on The Outer Limits (1995).

There were good ideas in here, but basically the writer and director were not up to the task of producing a good movie. For example: the subject/lead is quite emotional and animated during the first 2/3 of the movie and during the last 10 minutes. But, during "phase 3" they had the actress walk around deadpan like Bride of Dracula. It was genuinely embarrassing. The action scenes toward the climax literally repeat. If they did one more close up of her contorting hands, I would have stopped watching. I guess they didn't have the money or creativity to make something progressive and interesting? To be fair, there are some engaging elements too, but- blah.