Don't Look in the Basement

Shot in twelve days in Texas for almost nothing, and considerably more effective than it has any right to be.

A nurse arrives at an isolated psychiatric hospital where the doctor has been letting patients act out their delusions as therapy. He is dead before she arrives, which she does not know, and the film does not tell her.

The whole thing is one building and a garden, and the tension comes from a simple structure: she cannot tell staff from patients, and neither can the audience, and everybody she asks is unreliable.

S.F. Brownrigg made it as a drive-in second feature and the acting is broad, but the central conceit works and the ending is nasty.

Listed and dropped. Passed 15 uncut in 2005.