NAILS (2017)

Studio:       MPI Home Video
Director:    Dennis Bartok
Writer:       Dennis Bartok, Tom Abrams
Producer:  Brendan McCarthy, John McDonnell
Stars:     Shauna Macdonald, Steve Wall, Ross Noble, Leah McNamara, Richard Foster-King, Robert O’Mahoney, Charlotte Bradley, Muireann D’Arcy

Review Score:

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Summary:

While recovering from a horrific accident, a partially paralyzed woman comes to suspect she is being haunted by a ghost from the hospital’s past.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Partially paralyzed after being badly injured by a hit-and-run driver while jogging, Dana Milgrom undergoes a painful recovery at Hopewell Rehabilitation Hospital. Dana’s dislike of the hospital intensifies when she comes to believe that someone is secretly stalking her at night, which her nurse Trevor Helms dismisses as an unlikely possibility.

Dana’s husband Steve and their daughter Gemma visit Dana. Trevor warns Steve that Dana may be hallucinating. Gemma meets hospital director Elizabeth Leaming. Steve tells Dana about Ashley, a promising new member of the track team he coaches.

While alone at night, Dana experiences another vision of the figure seemingly haunting her room. Dana describes the presence to Dr. Ron Stengel, who is more fascinated by the fact that Dana was dead for three minutes following her accident.

Dana nearly dies when the ghost disables her breathing machine. Dana tells Steve about seeing a man with a weird face and long hands. Surveillance cameras are installed in Dana’s room. Steve threatens Elizabeth regarding taking better care of his wife. Elizabeth admonishes Trevor about the equipment malfunction, which Trevor blames on the building’s bad wiring.

Dana seemingly discusses the ghost with invalid patient Ellie, who communicates with Dana from the room next door by thumping on the wall. Dana researches the hospital’s history online and learns about the 1984 suicide of orderly Eric Nilsson, who was suspected of mercy killing five children at the hospital.

Dana asks Trevor about Eric Nilsson, but he merely refers her to Dr. Stengel. Dana becomes hysterical when Trevor finds scratch wounds on her back, which she insists are a result of the ghost coming for her at night.

Dana talks to Dr. Stengel about Eric Nilsson. Stengel reveals that Eric was a psychiatric patient in 1972. Eric’s fingernails had to be kept short to prevent him from tearing out his own flesh. Seemingly cured, Eric got a job at the hospital as an adult. He was nicknamed ‘Nails’ for his unusual habit of clipping fingernails from child patients and collecting them in envelopes. Those clippings made him a suspect when five little girls died. Stengel further confesses that Eric killed himself in the closet in Dana’s room, from which Dana insists Nails emerges at night.

Over a Skype call with Gemma, Dana learns that Ashley has been spending more time at the house with Steve.

Nails emerges from the closet to attack Dana. The haunting vision disappears when Trevor arrives to rescue Gemma.

Dana shows footage of the closet door opening to Steve, who only worries that the cameras are reinforcing irrational fears. Dana instructs Gemma to ask Ellie about Nails to substantiate her claim, but the old woman next door suddenly dies.

Trevor nails the closet shut. Dana pleads with Trevor to help her escape the hospital, but he refuses to assist her further. Trevor later confesses to Elizabeth that he did see something in Dana’s room when he rescued her. Elizabeth refuses to reveal anything to Trevor about Eric Nilsson.

Online research leads Dana to conclude that she can see Eric’s ghost because of her near-death experience. Nails possesses Dana’s computer to show her a video of Steve and Ashley having an affair. Scratches including the words “I miss you” supernaturally appear all over Dana’s body.

In the basement, Trevor discovers a file for Dana Breiman. Nails supernaturally emerges from the wall to murder Trevor.

Steve tells Elizabeth that he suspects Trevor is responsible for tormenting Dana. Dana insists Trevor is innocent. Steve reveals that Dana’s file from when she was admitted to the hospital as a child with meningitis was found in Trevor’s office. Dana realizes she was a patient at Hopewell during the time when Eric Nilsson supposedly committed the child murders.

Elizabeth tries calling the police. However, a supernatural voice takes over the phone call. Nails attacks her.

Dana tells Steve that Nails showed her video of his affair with Ashley, sparking an argument between the couple. When the power suddenly goes out in the building, Steve goes looking for Ashley. Steve finds Ashley in their car, but she becomes paranormally possessed and attacks him.

Dana warns Gemma that they need to leave the hospital or else Nails will kill everyone. Gemma helps Dana remove her tubes and get to a wheelchair. Nails attacks another patient while Dana and Gemma look for a way out.

The women briefly encounter Stengel. Nails suddenly kills the doctor.

Dana locks Gemma out of a room so that she can confront Nails alone. Nails levitates Dana and throws her around the room repeatedly until she dies.

While recovering in an ambulance outside, Gemma tells paramedics that Nails killed her mother. A vision shows Eric Nilsson preparing to inject adult Dana with a hypodermic needle while she lies in a hospital bed, just as the children were murdered in 1984.

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Review:

A horrific hit and run accident left Dana Milgrom physically broken.  After several weeks in a coma, Dana wakes at Hopewell Hospital to find herself partially paralyzed, breathing through a tube, and only able to communicate with the aid of a computer.

Dana might be psychologically broken too.  When a shadowy shape seemingly emerges from a closet to tamper with her life-support system, Dana becomes convinced that the hospital is haunted.  Dana’s nurse Trevor assures her she is alone.  Dr. Stengel appears more interested in the near-death experience that brought Dana into his building.  And Dana’s track coach husband Steve seems preoccupied by his promising new athlete Ashley.

With everyone else dismissing her visions as post-traumatic paranoia, Dana ends up on her own to unravel the mystery.  What she uncovers are Angel of Death child killings and a strange suicide connected to a past that Hopewell Hospital prefers to keep buried.  As paranormal phenomena intensifies, Dana realizes the murderous man of her nightmares has his sights set on Dana specifically, yet she is powerless to protect herself and no one is willing to listen.

For most of the movie, I found myself more or less shrugging my shoulders out of unvested apathy.  Supernatural spooks of slow-burn suspense were so harmlessly marginal that “Nails” wasn’t tipping one way or the other as a particularly ‘good’ or ‘bad’ horror/thriller.

Then the filmmakers shrugged their shoulders too.  Having seemingly lost the last 20 pages of their script and being apparently unable to recall what those words said, everyone improvised a senseless conclusion.  Instead of coming across as passably mediocre, “Nails” threw away even that underachieving ambition to limp toward a takeaway impression of being irresponsibly uninterested in its own outcome.

“Is it all in her mind?” melodrama and singular creature in the corner creeps inherently don’t have the seismic activity to shake cinematic earth.  But “The Descent’s” Shauna Macdonald packs enough personality into her underwritten woman in distress role to keep the stereotype from getting stale.  Even if her character can be considered charmless, Macdonald isn’t, swinging sympathy to Dana’s side without really having to ask.

Cinematographer James Mather’s camera follows Macdonald’s lead by staying active to avoid stagnation, even when confined to one place.  Hopewell Hospital has all the usual haunted house hooks, hiding a low-budget production in its standard assortment of dimly-lit rooms, cobwebbed corridors, and peeling wallpaper.  Hopewell is scandalously understaffed considering its considerable campus, yet atmosphere earns an adequate grade for being engaging in spite of also being unremarkably routine.

Once all of the cards come onto the table, including pedestrian bits like a homewrecking mistress, a doctor spilling exposition beans like a gossipy schoolgirl, and an online research montage filling in additional backstory, you sell off remaining expectations to simply settle for the notion of “Nails” being inoffensively average entertainment.  This resignation barely has a chance to register however, when “Nails” introduces a twist – not from the story, but from an open admission that said story has no clue how to resolve itself.

Time.  Money.  Ideas.  Whatever “Nails” ran out of, the result is an indecisive direction where fiction folds under the bloated weight of too many possibilities paired with an inability to pick one.  Maybe the vengeful ghost was wrongfully accused of his mortal crimes.  Maybe the hospital head leads a conspiratorial cabal with a sinister agenda.  Maybe Dana’s past hides an integral secret.  Maybe director Dennis Bartok just had to film the finale while afflicted with amnesia.

Who knows what happened or why anyone thought leaving “Nails” essentially unfinished would go unnoticed.  Predictable plotting, dull dialogue, slim scope, and other substandard stylings can be absolved as “so what?” slips of no big deal import.  But the film’s rushed resolution smacks of unenthusiastic carelessness to get a quick flick in the can and pinch it out to the public.  That’s a frustrating cinema sin that insults the audience, which is far more difficult to forgive.

Review Score:  40

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