A grieving mother uses virtual reality to find answers and plot her revenge.
I’m not an aficionado of virtual reality, screeching when my sons force me to walk the plank off a highrise, even though my fall will be broken by my living room carpet. But I am fascinated by the idea that we’re in a simulation – it seems to make so much sense, even if I’ve just been programmed that way – and snappy indie comedy-thriller ClearMind leans heavily into the unbearable sadness of reality and the lengths we are prepared to go to to avoid the real world.
That applies whatever our ages and whatever horrors we have seen, even though the characters in ClearMind are middle aged, paradoxically fretting about their own mortality while also faced with the upending that occurs when someone young dies out of the accepted order.
It is Nora’s child Hannah who has died, drowning during a pool party at their house with all their close friends in attendance. And with Nora’s wet blanket ex-husband Michael now moving on with 25-year-old religous podcaster Shelby, Nora has to work out how to move forward herself: mainly through getting her own back via a virtual reality system called ClearMind, run by friend and sometime grief counsellor Lily (Jenn Lyon, deliciously smug).
“Memory is the enemy,” states Lily, determined to move Nora (Rebecca Creskoff) forward into a new reality. The ClearMind process begins with scenes of birds nesting and bike rides with Hannah, but that’s not enough for Nora, who moves it towards something much darker as she takes matters into her own hands.
Meanwhile their friendship group are having their annual get-together but haven’t invited Nora. Happy to include divorcing couple Kate and David (Seana Kofoed, who also wrote the script, and Matt Peters), as well as Michael (Rob Benedict) and gorgeous godbotherer Shelby (Jessica Meraz), it shows just how desperate the group are to avoid the awkward bereaved mum.
Rounding out the group of feeble men (I did laugh when they tried to recast it as a men weekend, or “meekend”) and interesting, flawed women are the laidback, bemused Tom (Kadeem Hardison) and his wife, the super capable, veering on controlling Shannon (Toks Olagundoye). Tom is the nicest, Kate the most sympathetic, though will it save them?
I have to admit, Shelby – annoyingly beautiful, and also just annoying – actually became my favourite character, which only made sense when I discovered who she actually was during the reveal. They say the devil has all the best lines, though in this case it’s God, as her most entertaining quotes all come from the Bible.
Is your safe space safe for everyone else? Can you die in a simulation? Do NPCs feel pain? Is pain just code? And why are we so scared of women who have every right to be sad? All of these questions and more are raised, to differing degrees, by writer Kofoed and director Rebecca Eskreis.
Kofoed has form when it comes to ensemble mini breaks about death and friendship, having written 30 Miles From Nowhere, about a group of old friends mourning their dead pal in a that horror stalwart, a cabin in the woods. Despite the creepy happenings in that film, that ClearMind is about a group of old friends avoiding their bereaved friend by retreating to a cabin in the woods speaks to how much a safer bet we consider the dead to be, than those they leave behind. Regardless, Kofoed proves she hasn’t lost her touch when it comes to snappy, snippy dialogue, and her acute awareness of how long-time friends speak to and about each other, dropping accidental truth bombs as they seek to absolve themselves and shift attention.
Some ideas raised in the movie go unanswered, though I did enjoy the ride, and the opportunity to champion a flailing, pissed-off, middle-aged mum even if she does then appear wielding an axe.
The weekend has long been an annual ritual, at a lovely lakeside house previously owned by Shannon’s grandfather. It’s also got the world’s biggest, multi-level deck, great for low budget movie making where you probably can’t afford too many sets.
The list of potential murder weapons is wittily introduced: faulty electric wiring, the sound of hunters shooting in the woods. There’s even a mallet that comes with the flatpack chairs, and once again I wondered how different an American horror film would be if filmed in Britain, where anyone wanting to kill someone after putting together flatpack furniture – a not unlikely scenario – would be left ineffectually scraping their 15th set of free of allen keys over their victim’s knuckles.
Nora’s unexpected arrival at the lake house upsets the applecart, as she demands answers from friends and her ex-husband. Michael is forced to explain his platitudes that Hannah’s last thoughts as she drowned would have been images of her family, but Nora is scathing: “does it work that way? You get to choose your screensaver before it all goes black?” Nora is furious at their friends for distracting her and Michael at the party, but mostly at herself and Michael for allowing themselves to be distracted.
At a nifty 85 minutes ClearMind zips along, an intriguing, darkly funny thriller more than a horror. That’s partly because sad, angry Nora is not transformed into Sarah Connor or Ellen Ripley, but is simply sad, angry Nora with access to weapons. And she doesn’t always succeed straight off the bat, a welcome dose of realism in a world that is anything but, even if it does mean for a slower, more painful death.
The ensemble cast are adept at exploring the issues at stake and they act and feel like real friends, simultaneously eternally linked yet always on the verge of becoming weary of each other. They are helped by Kofoed’s authentic dialogue, which always sounds like angry or drunk or bitter people actually speak, rather than how their movie counterparts would. Creskoff is really terrific, movingly exploring Nora’s hurt and rage, those smokescreens for never-ending grief, and indeed the freedom being the “mad woman” can actually bring: any expected social niceties she has long ago buried with her daughter.
ClearMind is currently available to buy/rent on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Sky Store, YouTube Movies and Microsoft Video Store.
Read my (very spoilery) article, Still Game: Life and Death in ClearMind
Watch the ClearMind trailer now: