Final Recovery is an indie dramatic thriller that looks at the subject of substance abuse. Directed by Harley Wallen (Beneath Us All, Ash and Bone), and co-written by Jerry Lee Davis and Nick Theurer, this tells a story with an obviously low budget, yet there was something engaging about this regardless.
Rodney (Jasper Cole - Fall, The Purge: Anarchy) is a regular at the Sage Treatment Facility; a drug rehabilitation centre run by the motherly Nanny Lou (Charlene Tilton). He finds himself back there again after succumbing to his addiction. Unlike many of the other patients however, Rodney feels he knows full well how evil the place is. Nanny Lou gets money from the government to run her centre, and so in her desire to always have a full house of patients, she provides her own special drug concoction to those recently released, knowing that their addiction will soon lead to them being brought back by corrupt cop Levi (Michael Emery - An Intrusion, The Lurker) and his partner (a small part by Wallen). Dustin (Damien Chinappi) is a newcomer to the centre, and while him and Rodney initially don't get on, they put aside their differences to find a way to survive their ordeal.
With a blissful week off from my day job, I decided I would allow the luxury of watching horror films for review at night instead of daytime. That is the ideal way to watch horror films, but due to having to be up at 05:00 each week day for work it isn't exactly practical. Final Recovery is the first film for this week that I (mostly) watched at night. I admit that with about twenty five minutes to go, I fell asleep, having to watch the last part the next day! It is a mix of drama and thriller, but by far it is the dramatic element that is most prevalent. If it wasn't for a bonkers subplot that eventually gets thrust into the limelight for the thrilling final twenty minutes, I would be hesitant to even call this a thriller.
Tilton plays an almost pantomime villain, while she has decent motivations for being like she is (having witnessed her father be murdered by a junkie as a child, shown as the film's prologue), this doesn't alleviate the fact that she just seems plain evil. She acts like she cares about her patients, but it is always obvious that she doesn't believe what she is saying, and is bizarrely ready to threaten absolutely anyone who suspects her of not having the patients best intentions at heart. It makes it hard to believe she would be able to get away with all the insane things she is doing. It is never explained where she gets the special drugs from that her patients get addicted to, and it is never adequately explained just what on earth the reasoning is behind the sinister subplot boiling mostly away in the background. Rodney was fine as the protagonist, but had a weird vibe to him. He knows that Nanny Lou is evil and that she is responsible for making the drug problem in the city worse, yet he also constantly antagonises and threatens her when he is in no position to do so. This limits the characters movements causing a basic plot take longer to reach its conclusion than it should have done. That isn't saying Final Recovery is too long, at ninety six minutes it is fine, I didn't find myself getting too bored.
There are some moments of ultra violence mixed in with a mostly more realistic feeling drama. The low budget is evident in the bland set design, and I had some sound issues with this, especially towards the start. I'm not sure if that was down to the screener I had, so I'm giving the benefit of the doubt and not factoring that into my overall score. I really enjoyed the final act of this thriller, it had some fantastic looking scenes in which characters have lights flickering near them, plunging them in and out of darkness. There were also some tense moments, such as a scene of Dustin slowly walking down a basement corridor towards an ominous door.
I would say that the evilness of the antagonist was never hidden. It is obvious from the start she is a bad person, and that some really messed up things are happening at her centre. I couldn't help but feel that a gradual reveal of this would have been better than going all-in at films beginning.
Final Recovery was an entertaining indie drama that tries its best to look at the subject of addiction. This veered too much into drama for me, with the thriller element only really appearing towards the end. I thought the film was decent enough, but as little too light on thrills for the type of movie I was personally hoping for.
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