CONTROL – a film by James Mark – SPOILERS

On a sunny afternoon, a five-year-old girl (Evie Loiselle) sits in the sand by the sea and sings “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” A woman appears, and the scene is intercut with snippets of gunfire and men in black. “Increment and initialize, Phase One Commencing” a female voice says, and Eileen (Sara Mitich) wakes up. The disembodied voice tells her: “Move the pencil. Complete this task within the allotted time.” Unable to get more information from the voice, she decides to move the pencil, which is across the room on a table, but has difficulty using her legs, as though walking is something she hadn’t done in a while. Once the pencil is moved, Eileen is rendered unconscious, and she dreams.

She wakes again and the pencil is back along with the same instructions, but this time she is chained to the chair, handcuffed with cable ties, and is no longer barefoot. The voice tells her “If the task is not completed within acceptable parameters, your daughter will die.” She remembers that the girl on the beach in her dreams is her daughter Eve, and calls her name. (We see an image of Eve putting a shushing finger to her lips.) Protesting gets no results, so Eileen uses her shoelaces to apply friction to the cable tie until it breaks. (One wonders if the shoelace should not have broken first.) She tosses the shoes to move the pencil, and is again made unconscious.

Eileen has a small bald spot where something has been implanted under her scalp, and that implant might be what knocks her out. Her dreams always take her to the beach and after she gets a cut on her forehead during her attempts to comply with the voice’s demands, that cut also appears on her forehead in her dreams.

Regaining consciousness once more, she notices that the shoes are gone. A transparent barrier has been erected between her and the table, and she is again asked to move the pencil. Having no other choice, she shouts at the pencil through the transparency, and it moves.

Her husband Roger (George Tchortov) is in the room with her the next time she wakes up. Eileen behaves like an amnesia victim, only remembering Roger when she notices they have matching wedding rings. Roger is not permitted to physically help Eileen perform designated tasks, but he can assist indirectly. (In reality, he is not much help, but he does tell her that she teaches condensed matter physics, another thing she did not remember.) The series of tasks goes on, concluding with a disassembled pistol that needs putting together. She does this, aims it at Roger, and pulls the trigger, but the bullet stops in mid-air before it hits him.

Eileen’s psychokinesis seems to be governed by rules. She is able to warm her drinking water, and all the objects she moves with her mind are surrounded by air, so it seems likely that she is only able to manipulate fluids. She fails to save Roger when he is buried in sand in a container, because there is no surrounding air to act on the sand covering him. When she fails that test, she gets very angry with the voice, and sends a shockwave through the room that knocks the cover off of the speaker through which the voice communicates. The voice then (calmly) says: “Phase Two Complete”. Eileen is not rendered unconscious and three armed men wearing black enter the room. Their leader says “Come with us.”

An intricately choreographed fight sequence follows, and Eileen’s long, slender fingers make her a convincing remote puppeteer. Once all three guards are dead, she leaves the room. Just outside, she finds a hastily abandoned computer desk complete with spilled coffee, and a sign that reads “Test 0298 in Progress”. Eileen deals with another five gunmen, and before killing the last one she lifts his face mask (perhaps to reassure herself that he is an actual person), then extracts his eye and uses its retinal pattern to open an elevator door.

The elevator has an up button and a down button, but no numbers. It takes her to a floor with green lighting where a sign reads “Test 0297 complete.” She finds nothing else on the green level, returns to the elevator, and ascends to a floor lit in purple, where she finds three doors labeled “Materials“, “Supplies“, and “Spares“. Roger is curled up in a vaguely fetal position in front of the doors repeatedly saying: “They’re all like me.” Behind the door marked Spares, Eileen finds duplicates of Roger hanging in body bags. Behind the Supplies door is a pile of sand. Behind the Materials door are objects of the sort that Eileen has been asked to manipulate.

The next (and final) level is entirely dark when she arrives, but Eileen soon finds herself standing under a spotlight, and the film ends in a way which can best be described as entirely unexpected.

Eileen’s psychokinetic powers perform according to discernible rules, making it appear that she is being trained to use them properly. It is unclear how much of the rest of it — the guards, Roger, the beach, the elevator — is real and how much is created by her own mind. James Mark’s 2019 film ENHANCED is about test subjects of a US Government research program who acquired superhuman abilities by absorbing power from a dimension characterized by zero entropy. This is entirely speculative, but Eileen could be one of those test subjects, now being subjected to training and/or rehabilitation.

Sara Mitich told Ian Sandwell of Digital Spy that she had hoped for a wicked twist in the film’s plot but didn’t expect it to “go that dark”. Sandwell noted that the ending of the film left quite a lot of things unresolved. “We never talked about it,” replied Mitich. “I’ve never gotten into it. Maybe that’s for a sequel, to get into the nitty-gritty of what this is. I’ve thought about it, sure, but maybe just subconsciously in my process, I didn’t want to know because she wouldn’t know…But I’m very curious.”

The screenplay was written by director James Mark and Matthew Nayman. Their most recent film, FIGHT ANOTHER DAY, was released in 2024.

---

CONTROL can be streamed on TUBI

* Last Updated 3 months ago ago

Share this: