BY TIM GREAVES
One
of the most surprising things about director Roger Christian’s 1982 chiller The
Sender, which screams America from almost every fibre, is that it’s British
made. With a cast and crew of varied nationality and narratively set in America
– location work took place in Georgia – all the studio work for the Paramount
Pictures production was actually shot on stages at Shepperton in the UK.
British
born Christian himself was a former Academy Award winning art director on the
first Star Wars (and a nominee in the same category for Alien). On the other
end of the ‘accomplishments to be proud of’ scale, however, he’s the man
responsible for the woeful Battlefield Earth, so it’s fair to say his cinematic
career was mixed. The Sender, his debut in the director’s chair, resides on the
upper end of that scale.
Following
a failed attempt at suicide on a public beach, a nameless young man suffering
from amnesia (Zeljko Ivanek) is committed to a sanatorium for psychiatric
assessment by Dr Gail Farmer (Kathryn Harrold). Before long she begins
experiencing phantasmagorias, at first confounding, then progressively
disturbing. It transpires her patient, who’s tagged John Doe #83, is a
telepath, but to a level beyond his control, cursed with unconsciously transferring
the conjurings of his dreams and fears into the minds of others, skewing their
sense of reality. After she’s visited by Doe’s subtly manipulative mother
(Shirley Knight), Farmer believes she's starting to get to grips with the lad,
but she hasn’t accounted for how deeply he’s penetrated her psyche and how
great an influence he has on her ability to distinguish between the physical
and the hallucinatory.
The
Sender’s ability to toy with an audience’s perception of what is and what isn’t
real gifts it with the tropes of one of the better entries in the series
spawned by Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street – minus its infamous child
molesting maniac, of course. The waking dream sequences are expertly realised,
several of them genuinely chilling, and writer Thomas Baum taps into a number
of base human fears with his gleefully dark and disturbing script. For example,
there’s a full blooded yikes moment in which it goes unnoticed by surgical
staff that the patient on the table has woken during an invasive procedure. If
that doesn’t touch a nerve, little will, although murophobics should definitely
approach with caution! The film’s highlight hallucinatory sequence is served up
in a marvellously staged setpiece during an attempt to administer shock therapy
treatment to Doe, wherein all manner of telekinetic hell breaks loose.
Yet
for all the horrors The Sender has stashed in its pocket, there’s a curious undercurrent
of melancholia coursing through its veins. It’s a facet that enables the viewer
to empathise with Doe, who, much like Carrie White before him, hasn’t chosen to
walk a destructive telepathic path, but rather has been pushed that way by
circumstance rooted in a toxic maternal relationship.
Of
the cast there are several standouts. American Kathryn Harrold, who over the
period of just a few years scooped starring roles opposite the likes of Steve
McQueen (The Hunter, 1980) and Arnold Schwarzenegger (Raw Deal, 1986), is
excellent and – let’s not skirt it, seriously gorgeous – as the beleaguered
psychiatrist. Christian couldn’t have chosen a better leading lady, her
authoritative confidence masking an endearing fragility. Perhaps the most
recognisable among the cast’s British contingent is Paul Freeman, who brings
class to everything in which he appears and pleasingly gets plenty to do here.
As the head doctor at the sanatorium, the impotent voice of reason amidst the
less and less easy to explain away dramatics, he commands the screen whenever
he’s on. Shirley Knight meanwhile delivers an elegantly eerie performance as
Doe’s mother, arriving to impart an earnest warning about her son, then
departing with ethereal serenity. And then there’s Slovenian actor Zeljko
Ivanek in the first of what thus far tallies in excess of a hundred film and
television roles, large and small; he most recently cropped up in 2017’s Three
Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. His John Doe is at once scary and
sympathetic, and on the strength of his stellar performance it’s easy to see
why he continued in the profession with such success.
With
moody cinematography from debuting DoP Roger Pratt (Brazil, Batman) and a score
by Trevor Jones (The Dark Crystal, Angel Heart) that spans the thrill-infused
to the breezily melodic, The Sender is arguably Roger Christian’s most enjoyable
film and well worth spending time with.
Arrow
Video have done a splendid job with their restoration, which looks absolutely
luscious on their new Blu-ray release. The supplements comprise an audio
commentary from Roger Christian, interviews with Thomas Baum and Paul Freeman,
an overview of psychic horror in the cinema from genre guru Kim Newman, a
decent sized step-through stills gallery, a trawl through all the extended,
alternate and deleted material in Baum’s shooting script, and a trailer. And
what would any Arrow release be without reversible sleeve art and an attractive
limited edition collectors’ booklet?
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