Chattanooga Film Festival 2023 – If you had the chance to commute your prison sentence by participating in a top-secret government experiment, would you? That’s the choice Willem (Stephen Phillips) is faced with in director Tristan Barr‘s gritty and cerebral creature feature Subject. Well, okay, Willem isn’t really given a choice per say. Rather, he’s intercepted by a shadowy government agency. As the experiment gets weirder and weirder, he struggles to maintain his sanity. This becomes a movie about one man inching closer to total madness. It’s a heck of an emotional ride.

Initially, nothing is shared about Willem’s life and why he’s prison bound. Instead, government agents stop the transport vehicle and take Willem to an isolated facility. There, he records a video journal, and slowly, the pieces of his life come together. We learn that his wife Carrie (Cecilia Low) died, and after that, Willem turned to heroin, essentially abandoning his two daughters. There’s a bit more to Willem’s life story than that, but to reveal much more would spoil too many important plot points. These flashbacks are sprinkled throughout the lean runtime, fleshing out Willem’s character and troubled past. The memories look like home movies, initially presenting the idea that at one time, Willem had a pretty decent life.

Willem spends the rest of his time doing pushups and running around the small facility, trying to stay fit and maintain his sanity. By the halfway point, he claims a creature is watching him, but who or what the creature is remains unknown. Is it even real? Is it a figment of Willem’s imagination? Is he totally losing it? Is it a metaphor for his addiction? The viewer can decide that, but Willem is certainly convinced it’s real and always watching him. At night, it looms over his bed. The scientists, who every now and then ask Willem a series of questions and zap him if he lies, don’t say anything about the monster, adding to the ambiguity. That said, the creature looks really cool, with its razor-like fingernails. It chitters and simply watches, until it doesn’t, growing more dangerous each time Willem drifts to sleep.

Subject isn’t a mindless creature feature you’d watch on a Sunday on the SYFY channel. It’s about a man struggling to stay sane, forced to ponder all of the horrible past decisions he made, which ultimately dissolved his family. This is mostly a one-man show, and Phillips turns in a solid performance. His character goes through the emotional ringer as the feature deals with heavy themes of loneliness, grief, and addiction. Instead of a cheap rubber suit monster, we have a gnarly creature that’s the extension of one man’s very damaged psyche. Subject is a tense and intelligent chiller.

After screening at the 2023 Chattanooga Film Festival, Subject will stream on Screambox in August.

7 Out of 10