Dementium

If your bingo card had haunted hallucinogenic hard drug Christmas on it, you have won big time with the impressive indie reality bender Dementium, directed by Mark Wilson Sunderland, from a script by Sunderland, Clayton Thompson, and Kyle Sunderland. Wyatt Bailey (Michael Aaron Milligan), and Cora Roberts (Karynn Moore) are paddling across a peaceful lake on a beautiful day. Both of them exchange witty comments on how other people find this sort of thing relaxing, as well as whether their first date is going well. They pull up to shore; as they pull the boat aground, the story flashes forward to a later time, with Wyatt pulling the boat alone. He is stopped by the groundskeeper, Violet (Dani Deette), as she knows all the residents there and doesn’t recognize Wyatt. That’s when she finds out Wyatt is the son of Jeffery Bailey (Adam Boyer), the owner of the lakeside community. Violet apologizes and asks Wyatt to let his dad know she has a Christmas present for him, as she hasn’t seen him this year to work the Christmas tree farm.

Wyatt Bailey (Michael Aaron Milligan) and Cora Roberts (Karynn Moore) share a quiet canoe ride in Dementium.

“On top of the table, right by his plate, is an open coffin.”

Wyatt lets Violet know he has shit he still needs to load in from the car, and sends her off. Inside his family’s old house, Wyatt makes a spectacular-looking meal and sits down at the dining room table to eat it. On top of the table, right by his plate, is an open coffin. Wyatt rises and closes the lid before he continues eating. Later, he listens to a voicemail from Cora, the last one she left him. He then sits down in front of the coffin again; this time, in front of him is a choice of a spoon and needle with some heroin, or a tweaker pipe with a little baggie of DMT. As he spins a lighter between the two in order to choose, his probation officer, Ashlyn Bedford (Kristin DeVore Rakes), knocks on the door. Wyatt swears to her that he is clean, and later proves it to himself by choosing the DMT over the heroin. A friendly scientist (Doug Dawson) explains in front of a blackboard how fast-acting DMT is, and also warns that the mindset is crucial, as all dreams it brings can quickly become nightmares…

Dementium is everything I wanted for Christmas this year in a movie. Sunderland keeps all stockings stuffed with a horror sleigh ride like no other. While undoubtedly a horror movie, Dementium slips into different genres as smoothly as it jumps around time and space. I was particularly impressed with the suspense built around what happened in the woods with Nora, as that question keeps looming larger as shit gets weirder. Then Sunderland suddenly drops the viewer into intricate drama, with an extended, dialogue-driven sequence that could have come out of a Richard Linkletter picture. That this jarringly emotional portion feeds directly into the insane horror is pure evil genius. We’ve seen other horror directors, like Spider One, get phenomenal results from injecting drama into horror, with Sunderland’s work here joining the line of successes.