Film Review: ‘Burning Inside’ – A Surreal Nightmare You Cannot Escape
Burning Inside (2009)
Studio: Channel Midnight Productions
Director: Nathan Wrann
Cast: Michael Wrann, Kristina Powis, Tiffany Kenney, Bob Tschilske, Bret Logan
Review by: Marc Patterson
Art house film and surreal cinema are styles of film that don’t go to waste on a guy like me. I love me some pulp grindhouse. I’m a big fan of gore and video nasty, but I also have a special place for the weird and far out. Burning Inside, a low budget production from independent horror film house Channel Midnight Productions is just such a film… surreal, art house, weird, and far out.
The film opens with the camera fixated on a hospital patient who is in a coma. A female nurse quietly attends to him and when she gives him a gentle kiss on his forehead he abruptly awakens. He has no recollection of who he is, or any memory of his life. He is simply called John Doe. Two police detectives question him, but he is unresponsive. He is assigned a psychologist who fails to open channels of communications with John. The only breakthrough moments come when he is with the nurse, who he calls Jennifer.
Eventually John Doe is released from the hospital, or at least we assume so, since the nurse leaves with him, moving him into a dilapidated old farmhouse. John attempts to take on a life of normalcy but is continually haunted by visions and an ever present burning need for revenge. (Get it? “Burning Inside”?) But against what? Something in his past wants out and eventually he discovers a film that helps him piece together his past. His past, present, and future worlds collide in a endless loop where it’s hard to tell what’s real from what’s not.
Okay, I’m about to go into a big diatribe regarding my breakdown of this film. Before I do so, let me clarify something for you. Back in the early 90′s I did a lot of acid and I fiddled around with various electronics and instruments while creating experimental noise with synthesizers, samplers, and anything else I could find. As an example, I would record the sound of a wire vibrating in a field, run that through various processors, and loop it while layering in deep drones from a heavily processed bass guitar – then toss in shit I could catch from AM radio waves for good measure. (you can see my music page for reference: DBaCC) During this time I watched a lot of David Lynch and smoked a boat load of pot, zoned out to free jazz, and sat in on beatnik poetry slams. Cronenberg and Lynch were my film heroes and William Burroughs was a literary god to me. (He still is.) My writing at that time was also pretty heavy-handed in the surreal. So take all of this into account here. You hit me with some art house horror piece like this and you’re basically dishing me up a slice of cinematic heaven. But not everyone shares my passion for the abstract. Just keep this rattling around in the back of your noodle while you read the rest of this review.
This isn’t the 90′s, and I’ve seen over 15 years worth of indie cinema between then and now. Burning Inside is pretty rare though in that it didn’t play like a student film as so many do. And I’m going to come out and say one more thing, Burning Inside will draw a lot of natural comparison to David Lynch’s Eraserhead. There’s no avoiding it. It utilizes many of the same motifs found in Eraserhead, such as the noise-based scoring and the heavy black and whites, though runs lighter on the expressionist symbolism than does Lynch, and to its credit is more accessible and packs in more narrative than Lynch offered up. For fans of the far out – that shouldn’t be something to scoff at, as if being accessible is a bad thing. Burning Inside offers many of its own challenges of abstraction and intellect, and while I think it’s fair to say that the filmmaker would rather we not make the comparison and allow this film to stand on its own the similarities are just too striking, and with all due fairness, it’s impossible to do so. Burning Inside clearly bears the mark of being inspired, and trust me – it’s not a bad thing.
That said – let’s make a point to keep any further comparative reference to a minimum. One thing that is immediately noticeable are the long and quiet shots, with very little spoken dialogue and the constant low-end drone of noise, as if you were listening to an industrial HVAC system from the inside, just set to a lower decibel level. The noise levels fluctuate by scene, occasionally attacking us with hollow knocking sounds as if to prompt us to emerge acid gaze. Occasionally these sounds take on the effect of a gun being fired from a distance in the background. Very surreal stuff and I was really enjoying listening to the film as much as I was watching it.
The long, quiet shots are often spent with very little on screen movement. The camera just sits and gazes. Again, this is immediately noticeable when we spend the first several minutes of the film just watching a man lie in bed while a nurse attends to him.
While at this point it seems a statement of the obvious to even mention, but I’ll do so nonetheless: The pacing of this film is incredibly slow and deliberate. Warning: You’re going to need two hours where you can commit to a serious piece of art house cinema. As slow moving as the film is, what I found most impressive was that I couldn’t look away from the screen. For two hours this film held my attention steadfastly. And as slow-paced as the film was, it shockingly moved through the two hour run time quite quickly. Talk about getting sucked up into a time warping vortex!
One thing I mentioned earlier was that the film was fairly accessible. That said – it’s more accessible than most surreal and abstract cinema. This is something I appreciate as my days of experimenting with mind-altering substances are far behind me. It’s not an easy film to understand and it’s easy to lose the narrative if you’re not paying attention, but keep your eyes on the screen and the story is pretty easy to follow. I didn’t feel like there was a lot to interpret on the first pass, but there is definitely a lot going on in places. Quick translation: don’t get up for popcorn or a piss.
Burning Inside is also incredibly violent in places, which further sets it apart from most abstract cinema. It’s not as violent as say Von Trier’s Antichrist, but grisly nonetheless. Wrann’s choice to include this non-expressionist violence (i.e. – read literal) in the film puts this film straight into the undisputed arena of pure horror. It avoids violence as sensationalism, and keeps it to the correct level to tell the story at hand.
All said – this isn’t going to be an easy film for most horrorphiles, but it will appeal to a select crowd that favors, or at least can appreciate, this type of filmmaking. If you’re among that group, then this is a film you’ll not want to miss. Burning Inside is now available on DVD and for your ease can be purchased via Amazon.com.
