The Vance Institute was director Lawrie Brewster's director's cut of his film Trauma Therapy: Psychosis. Under that title, the director was unhappy with additional scenes shot and inserted into his movie, featuring the late Tom Sizemore, so much so that he requested a pseudonym be used for that film rather than his own name. I have long enjoyed Brewster's method of directing, with films such as Lord of Tears and The Devil's Machine using his method of creeping Gothic horror. I didn't realise until after I had watched this that it was actually a sequel to the poorly received 2019 thriller, Trauma Therapy, with several actors there returning in the same roles.
Tobin Vance (Tom Malloy - Trauma Therapy) is a self help guru who believes he can help the weak reclaim their lives. He offers five of his followers a special chance to go on a five day retreat in which he promises them he will fix their problems. These include Nicole (Megan Tremethick - Werewolf Castle), a woman who was abused by her father as a child, Lily (Courtney Warner), a woman with an eating disorder, alcoholic Daniel (Craig J. Seath - The Devil's Machine, The Unkindness of Ravens), the cowardly Frank (Gordon Holliday), and Jesse (Jamie Scott Gordon - The Unkindness of Ravens, Lord of Tears). It soon becomes apparent once the group have gone to Vance's remote retreat that his methods are disturbing to say the least. Each day he puts the patients through intense psychological torture and sadistic tests that soon have the group fearing for their safety.
Aside from one sequence around the middle of the movie, the entirety of The Vance Institute is in black and white. This works well with the cold indifference with which Vance bullies and cajoles his easily manipulated patients, it also fits with the sparse location much of the film is set at. This felt almost a bit like Squid Game, albeit, a very stripped down and indie version of that movie, with an almost unsettling feel of Saw to it, though without the torture porn aspect of that one. The meat of the film is the five days of ordeals the group face, from venomous leeches, to poison and more, the group are put through a lot, helped along by some nasty drugs that cause them to hallucinate. It becomes clear that Vance is prepared to go to any lengths, with it showing him to have little respect for human life, apparently able to operate outside the law. One weird part never really explained was why he has armed guards under his employment. Unless I missed it, I don't recall any of the group every questioning why Squid Game style armed guards are everywhere.
I thought Malloy was great as the antagonist character, especially the scenes where his true vicious nature breaks out. Out of the protagonists, I was most impressed by Holliday, his character's path through the movie was interesting, with the actor getting to portray a whole range of emotions in a believable way. Jamie Scott Gordon's character secretly being an undercover policeman was kind of cool, but it did provide yet another familiar feeling of a stripped down Squid Game. I thought late arrival John (David Josh Lawrence - Trauma Therapy) was a decent enough character, but it might have been better had it not been immediately revealed he was a plant, secretly working for Vance. Maybe with this being a sequel it was felt this may have been obvious anyway due to him being a returning character. I found myself wanting to see how this would all pan out, and it went to some dark places (highlight being the colourful surreal group therapy scene), but occasionally it felt like the sparse sets and relatively few characters were due to budget constraints rather than having always been intentional.
It may draw some heavy parallels with that successful Netflix show, but The Vance Institute did enough to stand on its own. A departure from the often Gothic feel of Brewster's other films, this cold look at a villainous cult kept me engaged throughout. The Vance Institute is distributed by Hex Media Ltd and is available on Amazon Prime UK, and at Hex Media's online store, here.
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