What is your most primal fear?
Phobias asks just that—and how it can be used against you. The dark, moody anthology flick follows Johnny (Westworld’s Leonardo Nam), a lonely computer programmer who lives in a dreary, crime-ridden city with his ill father.
One night, Johnny is captured by the government and brought deep into the desert to a laboratory. This facility is led by the cartoonishly sadistic Dr. Wright (Ross Partridge). Wright holds a group of hostages at the facility, where he runs horrific experiments on them to weaponize fear.
Each prisoner suffers from extreme phobias—hoplohopbia (fear of guns), vehophobia (fear of driving), robophobia (fear of robots), atelophobia (fear of not being good enough), and ephebiphobia (fear of youth).
Each time Wright wrangles and straps down one of the prisoners, he places a painfully uncomfortable device on their heads, which forces them to relive a traumatic experience in their life that was the catalyst of their fear. As the prisoner experiences these memories, they convulse violently. Wright drains their fear, which comes out as a liquid—how is this possible, you ask? We never find out.
Each session tells a different story in flashbacks about the prisoners, created by different directors. Some fly under the radar, while others, like Ephebiphobia and Atelophobia, stand out.
Ephebiphobia is Emma’s (Lauren Miller) greatest fear, directed by Chris von Hoffmann. The short segment takes us directly into the horrific moment when Emma, a teacher, has her house broken into by three of her young students, who are also the children of a man with whom she’s having an affair. They beat her, threaten her, and humiliate her which ends in unexpected tragedy. It’s a jarring, eerie segment that highlights the depravity of youth and what they can get away with due to their innocence. However, this segment left me wanting more–what happened before this? How did the kids find out? How did it lead to this?
Atelophobia should have been a separate movie altogether—it’s just that good. Directed by Jess Varley, Atelophobia focuses on Renee (a stellar Macy Gray), a former architect that has bandages all over her face. In a bright but terrifying flashback sequence, Renee runs a highly successful architectural firm. She’s an outlandish boss who wears gloves constantly, and her young, attractive employees are positively terrified of her. She’s known to “bury” those who get on her bad side or do something wrong. When something goes wrong with a recent project, she invites her new employee and two more experienced employees to her lavish, modern home under the pretense of fixing the issue. She gives them dinner and drinks as they go over their work. Slowly, the drugs she slipped take effect, and in a deadly sequence, Renee dons a black apron, drags her unconscious employees into a fire-lit room slathered in plastic tarps, and dissects them for their eyes and their fingers. Later, Renee goes into the bathroom to shower—as she disrobes and turns on the lights, we see her covered in other’s body parts—her fingers are an abhorrent concoction of dead flesh from previous victims, and there are stitches all over her back. She’s a serial killer with atelophobia—the fear of not ever being good enough.
It’s an incredible sequence that left me with so many questions—who is Renee? How long has she been doing this? What ignited this fear? How did it lead to serial killing? On top of it all, Macy Gray killed it. No pun intended—but maybe just a little.
Give Macy Gray her own movie about Renee, the sleek, serial-killing architect. Give me more backstory on Emma and the affair she’s having with her students’ father. The rest of the film paled in comparison to these two.
Phobias has a lot to be desired. What is the electrical figure haunting Johnny? Where is this government facility? How does Wright collect their fear in fluid form, and why?
In addition, I thought it odd that these “phobias” weren’t really “phobias” at all, but rather tragic, painful memories that fit the terms of these phobias. The only one who had a true phobia was Renee.
The chilling cinematic score, Macy Gray’s acting, and the cinematography shone through, but couldn’t save a film that was pieced together haphazardly with poor writing. Jess Varley and Chris von Hoffmann should have taken their stories and ran.
Phobias
2021
dir. Camilla Belle, Maritte Lee Go, Joe Sill, Jess Varley, & Chris von Hoffmann
85 min.
Available digitally and on demand Friday, 3/19
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