[yasr_overall_rating]
Eight strangers go into a locked room for clinical trials on a new drug that gives them superpowers.
“The Subjects” feels like a diatribe about the implausibility of comic books masquerading as a feature-length film; luckily, it’s a diatribe with a strong premise. The plot sees eight strangers enter into a mysterious drug trial, where they’re asked to take a pill, and spend eight hours under observation. No one knows what the pill is supposed to do, but the money’s apparently good enough to make that a minor concern at best. A sudden bout of spontaneous human combustion makes the survivors second-guess their decision.
In the course of “The Subjects,” we see teleportation, time travel, and a host of other amazing abilities, but the characters are woefully unequipped to manage these gifts. The setting stays fixed in the testing area, so we never see the full scope of what they could do, but that’s fine. As a cautionary tale of how inept people would be if they possessed superhuman talents, it works – it’s people who can do the impossible, while still being powerless to save themselves. More often than not, those amazing skills are ultimately fatal. “The Subjects” reads like a spiteful retort to the glut of superhero films that have hit theaters, but their message, petty though it might be, stays on point.
The film handles special effects well, and it looks good overall. The drug trial takes place in an abandoned music studio, which is an odd choice for a drug trial, but it gives people space to move around, and it’s more visually interesting than a laboratory. As a darkly silly play on superhero origin stories, “The Subjects” works. As a character study, it falls drastically short. Every person in the film is broadly drawn, and they’re aggressively one-note. I had an easier time accepting that a pharmaceutical company could make a pill that grants god-like powers than I did accepting that these characters were supposed to be even loose approximations of real people. The dialogue was stilted and sometimes painfully trite; I’m hesitant to judge the acting in the film, because the performers had so little to work with.
As intriguing as the film’s hook is at the start, it fails to sustain interest. The characters get whittled down one by one, and it all leads to a weak ending, but we get some neat ideas along the way. A character who can turn invisible disappears from memory every time he vanishes, which is a fun twist on a familiar power fantasy; a time-traveler gives a cool, albeit headache-inducing, breakdown of how time might operate when someone can move freely through it (her story ends up being easily the most entertaining part of the film). Unfortunately, the lack of believable characters proves to be a fatal flaw. The film ends with a showdown of people with superhuman abilities we have no reason to root for, and any pathos we could have felt watching them all flail about trying to save themselves is lost, because they’re either critically unmemorable, or irritating to the point of distraction. “The Subjects” has a uniquely acerbic take on super powers, but its disinterest in the people who inherit them is its kryptonite.
For more information about the film visit the official website at thesubjectsmovie.com
