Waking Madison (2010)
The movie world is filled with talents coming from nowhere and making a splash. Director Katherine Brooks is not one of them. Her resume of MTV compilations and other professional jobs doesn't even quite prepare you for the badly worked clichés, uninspired acting, and amateurish writing here.
The reason it comes to mind here (and not all the other mediocre movies out there) is that Brooks is both director and writer here, as if she was really sure of herself.
The idea isn't bad in itself. A young woman (played by Sarah Roemer) faces her multiple personality disorders in a period of high drama crisis. And the movie manifests this for the viewer in an unexpected way. When this "trick" first becomes clear (and I'll give no hints here) it's fascinating, the one minute of actual fascination you can expect. When the trick gets played a second time it's pure sensationalism, or just lack of inspiration.
Another problem is Elizabeth Shue's performance as the leading psychologist, which at first I blamed on her. She's bland and unconvincing, even after the final twist when you might reevaluate what her purpose was all along. Now I lay some blame at the director's feet.
There are some nice grungy set designs, the music plays well into the mood, the photography is decent, the layering of video within the larger photography is interesting, and so on. I mean, it has the bones of a decent movie. It reminds you that writing comes first (the idea, and the dialog) and then acting and directing (hand in hand) are critical.
Who is this Sarah Roemer? A really promising actress with a terrible agent. The movies she has been in are rotten rotten rotten. So it's hard to see the energy she keeps just under the surface throughout. Likewise for two other secondary young women who play with intensity worthy of a spooky movie about mental disturbances: Imogen Poots (who was in the interesting "Solitary Man" with Michael Douglas) and Taryn Manning (who seems to have Roemer's same agent, or the same kind of agent).
So? What to do? Skip this one. There are many better low budget or low quality psycho flicks with better edges and surprises.
