Crew
Director/Screenplay – Sebastien Blanc, Story – Sebastien Blanc & Davide Marangoni, Producers – Alessio Di Naro & Davide Marangoni, Photography – Jamie Touche, Music – Daniel Nolan, Visual Effects – Rendered Pictures (Supervisor – Terence Hughes), Makeup Effects Design – David Foxley, Production Design – Daniel Dray. Production Company – Nebel Productions/Lakeside Pictures.
Cast
Tobi King Bakare (William Blackwell), Steve Oram (Dr Richard Blackwell), Ramona Von Pusch (Amelia Blackwell), Chandrika Chevli (Dr Shelley)
Plot
William comes out of a coma, having survived a car crash that has left him with brain injury. His adopted father Richard Blackwell, a renowned neurologist, takes William back to his home in the English countryside to recuperate. William asks where his adopted mother Amelia is but Richard keeps coming up with excuses, saying she is not well. William then makes the horrific discovery that his mother was killed in the car crash and that Richard has been conducting experiments to revive her in another body.
Cerebrum starts in promising ways. The plot description “After waking up from a year-long coma, an insecure young man must fight his controlling father in order to discover what really happened to his seemingly absent mother, as the true consequences of his past actions unravel before him” tells you almost nothing about the film – indeed, it is one that could easily play out as a regular drama or thriller with no genre elements.
As Tobi King Bakare is brought home by father Steve Oram, Cerebrum builds a subtle disquiet that you cannot put a finger on. There is the calm and cleanly white modern home and Oram’s mumsy insistence on tending to Tobi, the two of them sitting down to dine and so on. There are also Steve Oram’s evasions about what happened to Tobi’s mother and Tobi’s troubling flashbacks to something bad happening. That the sympathetic point-of-view character Tobi is mute throughout most of the film adds another level of tension.
What you expect, especially with a title like Cerebrum, is for the film to open up with some type of Conceptual Reversal Twist about what is going on – I kept thinking of something like Brain Dead (1990) or Open Your Eyes (1997). However, the actuality of what is going on is far more ordinary than anything like that and the big conceptual reversal is no more than an ordinary twist reveal – that we are in fact watching a Frankenstein Film.
After the revelation of what is going on, the tone of the film changes. What had seemed like a building conceptual mystery becomes no more than one about resurrection experiments, about Steve Oram obtaining the right body and of Tobi King Bakare’s growing horror about the situation. This does suggest one intriguing new twist that the Frankenstein film has not done before – that the bodyswap process is conducted by some form of digital Mind Upload.
Cerebrum was the first directorial outing for Swiss director Sebastien Blanc who had previously worked in short film.
Trailer here