The Institute (2017)



Last night, I took some time away from the blog as I was working on my National Poetry Month project, the epic poem Salvation. While that has proven to be extremely challenging, I am on pace to have it finished by the end of the month. To get back into the swing of things, I decided on the 2016 psychological thriller The Institute.


Plot/ In 19th century Baltimore, a girl was stricken with grief from her parents' untimely death voluntarily checks herself into the Rosewood Institute, and is subjected to bizarre and increasingly violent pseudo-scientific experiments in personality modification, brainwashing and mind control; she must escape the clutches of the Rosewood and exact her revenge.


When I saw this one on the shelf, I decided to give it a shot. While it is not a perfect film, it is an atmospheric and entertaining flick that was different than what I expected. There are some positives, as the performances were decent, the storyline interesting, the cinematography solid, and the atmosphere was better than I would have expected. Yes, it did lack some of the horror elements that I expected, the sound quality of the disk was off, and some of the characters felt flat, but those elements did not indeed hamper the end product that fit will into the Victorian aesthetic. In the end, the real horror of this tale is that it is believable in regards to the way patients were treated and experimented on during that era. Sure, this is not a perfect film (although I personally love it, as it matches my writing style), and it is more of a mental trip into days gone by, but it is a movie that fans of period horror pieces should check out. 


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