Breaking Dawn

This has nothing to do with Stephanie Myers’s Mormon vampire love tale, it is your typical straight to video sleeper. I have seen this movie twice on cable, and I have to admit that it is really not that bad. I wouldn’t say that it broke any boundaries, or was more clever than any other psychological horror movies that are out there, but it had a quality about it that made it interesting to watch.

We meet Eve, a psych student who lives alone with a controlled routine. Her class is performing something like a “teacher assistance” program through the college. The students are given a mental hospital and a patient and are told basically to either fix or make progress with the given patient. Eve is given Don, a mildly catatonic patient that was traumatized as a youngster by the murder of his mother. Eve is hesitant to begin with such a difficult patient, but her professor puts the pressure on and she gets ready to begin the project.

Don, who is played by Angelina Jolie’s brother, sits in a chair and drools on himself, as Eve begins her introductions in a soothing shrink voice, she tries to get him to talk. She asks him questions about his feelings and his memories and makes little progress until he freaks out, he’s a mental patient they do that sometimes. As security comes in to take him away he tells Eve not to eat or drink anything as it is poisoned or some shit.

Eve tries hard to make progress with Don but he is still holding back his secrets. Eve becomes paranoid and the deeper she goes into Don’s case the more her reality begins to unravel.

It is not cinematic genius, there are few effects and the plot is slow and eventually predictable. But I found Breaking Dawn to be refreshing. It didn’t have ghosties or gore, hell it even had a happy ending, but there was something calming about the way this movie was laid out that made me watch it a second time.