Clinical

Clinical (2017): Since I watched Stranger Things,I became a huge fan of Netflix.I made a decision that i should never miss any series or movie that comes from Netflix.So,I watched Clinical with decent expectations as it is a psychological thriller,my favorite genre.So how is Clinical?

Plot: Clinical, tells the story of Dr. Jane Mathis (Vinessa Shaw), a psychiatrist who develops the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) after she is brutally attacked by one her patients; and subsequently witnesses the patient cut her own throat. She begins seeing a therapist to cope with her PTSD and is advised to stay away from emotionally intensive patients.But she meets a new patient with PTSD named Alex (Kevin Rahm),a man who suffered a horrible car accident and is severely disfigured.

Plus Points: 1)Performances: Vinessa Shaw is the only pro for this uneven thriller.It is her performance which makes us intrigued in this hollow film.She gave decent performance as a troubled psychiatrist.Kevin Rahm's look as disfigured face has good make up work.

2)Production Values: This movie has good production values which helped a lot to give a perfect locations and camera work.

3)Background Score: Background score is good at few scenes.

Minus Points: 1)Screenplay and Direction: Clinical is interesting for first 20 mins,but after that screenplay goes very slow and repetitive.The sessions between Alex and Mathis is so boring.It just gives a build up of giving a mind blowing twist but instead its gives a pretty lame predictable twist.

So,Clinical is a boring psychological thriller where the performance of lead actress is the only saving grace.

My rating 5/10

The first half of the film seemed promising enough by giving us a mystery that unlocks as we progress with the viewing. However, the ending totally destroys any sense of impressive writing by the creators. Not only is the supposed twist easily predictable, but there is almost no logic to the progression of events in the end. Nor is there any satisfying explanation which brings us to the one major fault that overshadows all others: there is no closure to the story. Are we just supposed to assume on our own how the story of our protagonist actually ends? At least other non-closure endings like inception were intentional and meant to make the viewer think. This one however doesn't. Its as if the story has a beginning, middle, almost done, but no real ending. Did no one teach these writers how to close a story out? I'm guessing not, and hopefully in the future they may go back to school and actually finish 8th grade writing.

I would consider this psychological horror rather than thriller and I think it works quite well in this respect. I am now more afraid of the human psyche and I know for sure that I would never want to be a psychologist. However it is very repetitious in the first half and so it gets boring very quickly. Also there is not much going on visually in style, colors, shots, camera movement, etc. Overall I think it does a good job within its obviously small budget.

It was a nice movie with a very bad ending part. Without the last 20 minutes it was good but with that end, i am sorry... Nothing more than 6

I'll admit to being drawn into "Clinical" for its first 45 minutes. The plot, centering around a disillusioned psychiatrist reluctantly taking on a PTSD patient after her last go-around with an "intensive" client ended badly, offers up enough questions and mystique to lock you in. Then, somewhere around the hour mark, the film dives headfirst into a cheap plot twist that signals the film's narrative decline. The film dispenses with logic and heads into the rabbit hole, offering up a preposterous conclusion that destroys anything it previously had going for it. Twists in stories can often be used to wondrous effect, or they can derail your narrative into muck and make you wish the writer had played it straight. Often, you'll find it would have been a much better film had it dispensed with the shock factor and stuck to its guns. Such is the case with "Clinical."

I won't consider it a spoiler to say that, towards the end, things happen that beg a big "Huh?" from viewers. It's probably not a good sign for the writer when the character discovers a dead body and the viewer has to stop and ask themselves who the person is. Nor is the film in any way forthcoming about providing coherent answers to many of these questions. I'm not a lazy viewer. I don't demand a long, complicated piece of exposition to tell me everything, nor do I think all films should answer every question. But when so much of your story hinges on certain plot elements that you don't bother to fully elucidate in your narrative, the viewer can be left feeling a bit cheated. Much like the feeling one gets when a film ends before we see a proper conclusion to various plot threads that the writer has asked us to care about. Really, it's just not nice.

"Clinical" could have been something worthwhile, but ultimately the script lets the entire venture derail into frustrating ambiguity and lazy writing, offering up no compensation for the befuddled viewer who, by film's end, is left wondering why they even cared in the first place.