Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on November 16, 2006, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Unrest, directed by Jason Todd Ipson and playing as part of the After Dark Horrorfest, proceeds from a pairing of subgenre and location—a ghost story set in a hospital morgue—so appropriate to each other that it’s surprising they haven’t been combined more often before. In addition to plenty of opportunities for stark, spare atmosphere and nasty bits involving cadavers, the mix allows Ipson, who scripted with Chris Billett, to throw in occasional musings about the relationship between the dead and the living and how those who deal directly with the deceased—in this case, medical students—handle that interaction. The result is a thoughtful and spooky little movie that stands apart from the formulas that bind so many horror films in both the studio and independent fields.
Ipson’s own background as a surgeon stood him in good stead here, not only in terms of the cold-room arcana that adds to the verisimilitude (did you know, for example, that med-school stiffs are shipped from at least 500 miles away, lest a student recognize one of them?) but also for informing the discussions between heroine Alison (Corri English) and the three guys who become her lab partners. (Fortunately, Ipson minimizes the potential gender-based tension among them.) As she and Brian (Scot Davis), Carlos (Joshua Alba, Jessica’s brother) and Rick (Jay Jablonski) begin their gross anatomy exercises, they alternate between wisecracks and serious discourse about how to treat their dissection subject; as one of them claims, and anyone familiar with the horror genre knows, disrespecting a corpse can have unpleasant repercussions for the living who mistreat it.
Soon, Alison starts to get bad vibes from their female cadaver that have nothing to do with basic squeamishness. She begins the genre’s time-honored investigation into the dead woman’s background and why her spirit might be particularly unrestful, but it’s the movie’s treatment of death as a philosophical subject, and not just something scary that happens to the characters (though there’s a good amount of that too), which gives Unrest its real dramatic interest. Ipson and Billett have a good ear for this kind of dialogue, and the solid young cast (with wry support by veteran actor Derrick O’Connor as their seen-it-all instructor) makes you believe even their loftier exchanges on the topic.
The movie’s not all talk, though—there’s a good deal of the expected surgical gore, which Ipson films with a matter-of-fact approach that neither shies away from the bloody details nor rubs your face in them. As Alison gets closer to the truth she’s seeking, the movie comes to include its share of de rigueur restless-spirit activity, before winding up with a more unique climactic setpiece involving the morgue’s immersion tank. Here, Ipson demonstrates a refreshing orientation toward intimate, visceral shivers over CGI flash, and a commendable facility for making his limited resources work for him. He receives considerable assist from cinematographer Michael Fimognari, who makes the images appropriately pallid without getting all arty about it, a score by Michael Cohen with lusher orchestrations than usual for an indie chiller and uncomfortably convincing dead-body FX by Optic Nerve—whose creations reportedly lie alongside actual cadavers in certain scenes.
Unrest makes for a fine double bill with Mike Mendez’s The Gravedancers (with which it shares alternating Horrorfest showtimes). Both are cautionary tales about what can happen when the dead are insulted, and Ipson’s insular terrors nicely balance the in-your-face spookhouse scares of Mendez’s film. Unrest also stands just fine on its own as a demonstration that corpses don’t have to walk to make effective subjects for a fright feature.
