Candidate #7
THE TAKING OF DEBORAH LOGAN
The following film includes a partly edited medical documentary, outtakes, and surveillance footage from the scenes of the crime.
Adam Robitel’s feature debut takes the real life horror of Alzheimer’s disease and mashes that up with some supernatural goings on to produce a potent title in The Taking of Deborah Logan.
Here,
medical student Mia Hu (Neighbours’
Michelle Ang) sets about centering her PHD Thesis film on the titular Deborah
Logan (All My Children’s Jill Larson),
hoping to document the effects of the disease, not just on Logan, but on her
daughter Sarah (Anne Ramsay, from Mad
About You and The Secret Life of the
American Teenager), as well.
While
there are some heavy hitters in the mix here (the film is produced by Bryan
Singer--the closing credits actually declare it a “Bryan Singer Presents”
production) and some familiar genre figures are thanked in the end credits roll
(Bryan Cranston, Guillermo del Toro, Michael Dougherty, James Wan, to name some)
the onscreen MVPs here are definitely Larson and Ramsay, who ground the
proceedings in a very real mother-daughter relationship, warts and all.
“I do all my little
puzzles. I do crosswords. I’m lifting weights. I am doing everything that I… I have
read will help to stave off the progression of this disease. Stave it off!
There’s no cure. And so, when I am in the middle of something and suddenly, my
mind just… leaves the premises…. There are no words to describe how distressing
it is.”
Much
of the potency of the film is rooted in the awful deterioration that sets in
with Alzheimer’s, and as the narrative unspools, there are shades of The Exorcist, in that we are also
witness to the horror when modern medicine finds itself unable to deal with a
patient’s condition, when the doctors are just as in the dark as the besieged victim
and family.
There
is also at least one instance of a quick cut “subliminal,” again, ala The Exorcist.
Admittedly,
the title mines all that it can from the horror movie idea of the Creepy Old
Lady, which is sadly quite unfair to all the Nice Little Old Ladies out there,
but the end result is nonetheless an effective little found footage-y humdinger.
(The Taking of Deborah Logan OS courtesy
of cineemcasa.com.)
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