Crew
Director – Ian Hunt-Duffy, Screenplay – Darach McGarrigle, Producer – Simon James Doyle, Photography – Narayan Van Maele, Music – Die Hexen, Visual Effects Supervisor – Dan Cullen, Production Design – Steve Kingston. Production Company – Failsafe Films/Fis Eirann (Screen Ireland)/Epic Pictures.
Cast
Millio Brady (Claire Brady), Pollyanna McIntosh (Dr Emma Burke), Akshay Kumar (Amir), Abby Fitz (Alison), Diarmuid Noyes (Ray), Brenock O’Connor (Paul Murphy), Shonagh Marie (Vanessa), Frank Blake (Marcus)
Plot
A group of seven young people are gathered for drug trials held by Blackwood Pharmaceuticals under Dr. Burke. They are placed in a facility, which is locked and where they must remain. They are administered a drug that causes them to stay awake. However, Burke is ordered to give the participants a far larger dosage than they have been told. This begins to cause paranoia and a disturbed state of mind. After Burke is accidentally killed, they discover that the facility’s safety lockdown measures have been triggered and they are trapped inside.
The Irish horror scene has been producing some quite impressive independent films throughout the 2010s. See the likes of Outcast (2010), Citadel (2012), A Dark Song (2016), The Cured (2017), The Hole in the Ground (2019), Sea Fever (2019), You Are Not My Mother (2021), The Cellar (2022), All You Need is Death (2023) and Oddity (2024), among others. (For a more detailed listing see Irish Cinema).
There is a modest body of films about drug trials gone wrong from the origin scenes in the Stephen King adaptation Firestarter (1984) to Robert Rodriguez’s Red 11 (2019) and the very unique Special (2006) to the work that Double Blind most closely resembles, the British-made The Facility (2012). Less popular have been films about sleeplessness. There was the film The Soviet Sleep Experiment (2019), which sounds in a similar vein to this. Beyond that there was also the tv series Day 5 (2016-7) and the film Awake (2021) where the populace is affected by a plague of sleeplessness, although the most terrifying portrayal was Christian Bale’s performance in The Machinist (2004).
The basic set-up of Double Blind seems overly familiar. It is essentially a rehash of The Facility. One thing that does get me is how the people present are said to have been awake for over a hundred hours. A little bit of google fu shows me that after missing a hundred hours of sleep people will be experiencing complex hallucinations and delusions, temporal disorientation, along with severely reduced attention span and cognitive function. While the cast here do get paranoid and go crazy and arguably experience some hallucinations, they look too clean, at most as though they had spent a single sleepless night. Do a search for videos of people who have spent days awake and they look like wrecked, unhealthy zombies.
Double Blind was a directorial debut for Irish director Ian Hunt-Duffy, who had previously made some short films and tv episodes. Hunt-Duffy does an okay job. Things get notedly bloody towards the end. He does demonstrate he can handle the horror genre well. It is just that here he is treading material that feels overly familiar. With a better script, you suspect he could do something quite impressive.
Trailer here