Boy, I don't think there's a poster for this film online that isn't plagued with compression issues.
WEEK TWO (Oct 10): MEDICAL ISSUES
In what should have been a less surprising development, the concept for
Pin, in which a young man develops a most unusual bond with an anatomy doll and the steps he takes to ensure it stays strong, turns out to be one of the least unusual things about this Canadian horror film. What Canadian horror films may lack at times for gore is, from my experience, often made up in the kind of psychological horror that makes you want to drown your brain in bleach afterward, and for the most part,
Pin is a stronger example of that than most.
Even before the plot starts in earnest, the need to bleach starts strong, with the first third of the film concerning itself with the rearing of Leon and Ursula. Their parents have a strict regiment in place for them, to the point where going to bed becomes a fight for affection. Answer daddy's math question right, and you get rewarded with a plea for a good night's sleep: answer it wrong, and you get told to work on it for tomorrow. But through it all, both Leon and Ursula have each other, and that's something they don't want taken away from them. Did I mention yet that's partially because they sleep in the same bed until their early teens? Because that's a thing.
They also have Pin, an anatomy doll that resides in their father's office at a clinic. Rather than confronting kids head on with their inquiries into what's happening to their bodies, the good doctor (played by a game Terry O'Quinn) utilizes ventriloquism to make Pin come to life before their very eyes. Pin becomes their closest confidant, someone to confide in at the risk of breaking the rules of being in his presence while father isn't around, just because he's so caring and so willing to give them the answers to the hardest questions in life.
One of the best things that a lot of psychological horror films can do is not shy away from how a lot of little things can add up to a traumatic change later in life, and the filmmakers behind
Pin manage to mine that effectively even before the film is halfway over. In the case of his parents, they lack the awareness to fully grasp just how much damage they're inflicting on their kids, and while Ursula is a bit sharper and can catch on, Leon isn't so lucky, and his father realizes that far too damn late to do anything about it. Outside of one sequence, in which "improper use of equipment" could not be a more appropriate term, it's never just one thing that sets Leon on his path, unless you would count "his entire life up to that point" as one thing.
Explaining the story further would start getting into territory that's better left unknown, not because of spoilers, but also because you might want to bleach your brain before watching the film, which, from my experience, is not the preferred way of watching films. I will say that it does feel like what would have happened if someone tried to do a prequel to
Psycho, in which you get to witness firsthand how Norman Bates becomes Norman Bates, without the need to feel so beholden the iconic scenes and images from the films that came chronologically after it. It's a film that owes a lot to
Psycho, even as it goes in a wildly different direction with just about everything.
The low budget doesn't do it a whole lot of favors, but even its primary inspiration made due with a tiny budget, so it's a shame that the filmmakers aren't quite as adept at bringing the story to life from a visual perspective. They have some victories, like getting a hell of a lot of emotion from Pin by just finding the right camera angle and the right amount of lighting to change his stationary features to whatever the scene calls for, but for the most part, it's fairly dull film to look at, which is unexpectedly thrown into sharp contrast during a scene at a movie theater in which a fellow Canadian film makes a guest appearance during one of its more visually stronger moments. The acting is a bit uneven, which sometimes can work to its disadvantage later on in the film once Leon and Ursula, now played by David Hewlett and Cynthia Preston, respectively, play a lot of their scenes together, and you sometimes get conflicted if Hewlett is overplaying in scenes with Preston that could stand to be a bit more subdued all around or if Preston is just trying too hard to reach Hewlett's more natural level of intensity. They have a good rapport with one another, which helps a lot, but it's a problem that never quite goes away.
For a film this crazy and gutsy, though, it's hard to imagine what would have happened if everything was top-notch. There could run a risk of the film being even more effective, and for something as monumentally fucked up as it is already, I don't think there would have been enough bleach in the world for that.
Next film: We keep it in Canada for an interesting bridge between this week's theme and next week's, as we find out just how David Cronenberg treats the field of gynecology in
Dead Ringers. Free bleach for everyone!
