Movie Details
| Title: | Control | |
| Director: | Unknown | |
| Year: | 2025 | |
| Genre: | Thriller | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 12.26.25 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (3)
- Bat Pussy
- Rock & Roll Invaders: The AM Radio DJs
- Sophomore Swingers
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 12.26.25 | Dream | I watched Old Man & The Gun last thing before bed and am writing this note the morning after, as has been my habit over this holiday break. I had a dream though where I watched a completely different movie, woke up wondering if what I'd just watched was real or a dream, found the DVD cover and settled that it was real, then woke up again wondering the same thing. The thing is, the movie I watched is not a real movie even though I remember kinda sorta most of it along with the DVD cover art. I don't really have anywhere else to record this so it's going in here. The movie's name is Control. The DVD is one of those old paper snap cases that Warner Brothers produced in the early days of DVD, with an unbleached brown cardstock where a blurry spot-printed like newsprint image of a jungle and several figures with blurred out faces are kind of printed with negative space between them. The title is in strong block printing justified to the right except the 'O' is a soft blur and the edge of the 'L' is cut off on the right. The inside sleeve is a map of the village the movie takes place in with notable locations printed in red and numbered to a key along the bottom. My dream also had a kind of gift shop / museum where more materials that served as inspiration for the film were showcased. Source images of different elements and whatnot, but that's neither here nor there. The movie starts with a couple who are medics or doctors working in a village in the deep lush jungle. They are providing aid in the form of vaccines and small treatments and what have you when they see several kids with weird aberrations. Mutations in their body. They are healthy enough and we learn that they had much more serious maladies that are apparently cured. This leads the couple to investigate where these kids went for treatment and they find a compound outside the village up a hazardous trail. There, they find a large plantation-style house where a lady, probably Tilda Swinton, is conducting research into a special molten glass that has curative properties. We are shown around the facility along with the doctor couple and see her use this moldable hot glass to burn away tumors. We learn that the glass is radioactive but the facility itself has these vague devices which basically suck up the leaking radioactivity like a sponge. We see that there are special crystals that look like bundled fiber optic cables on desks and hung around the place which are receptive to radioactivity and would begin to glow if any danger is present, but they are all dormant. The glass itself is almost like molten sugar when making hard candy. The lady uses heat-resistant gloves when administering treatment but so far her experiments are a success. Um, so the middle of the movie happens. Can't really remember that. The movie discusses overpopulation and what will become of us as a species as we continue to reproduce. The house itself is part of a planned long string of similar houses that connect via walkways across the entire jungle, across rivers and lakes and through mountains connecting everyone into one big house. Then in the climax of the film, the doctor couple have to use the glass to save the lady and themselves, but the radioactive sponges overload and crack and the camera lingers on some crystals on the desk begin to glow. In the end, amidst a raging fire or some danger surrounding them, we see that the glass is cooling during the final treatments and begins to crack and break apart instead of folding. Still, it seems that whatever this final procedure was, it was a success as everyone gets away in time before the house goes up in flames. Then in the final scene, it's a point of view shot of someone lying down. Parts are hazy or unfocused but we see a nurse looking down at us checking our progress. The nurse is wildly mutated with one big eye on her face like the sides of her face collapsed to the center. She bends close and we see that her throat opens at her neck, revealing a series of three or four throats and each open as saliva runs down them. Then we can see an exposed trachea and little hermit crab legs tickle from the top of her neck like some creature is living in her head. We look down at ourselves and see that we are the male doctor, we are also terribly mutated into a tentacle-arm open-chest body-horror mess, and we realize the nurse is the female doctor. We've survived but everyone involved has mutated into lumpy masses of wrong anatomy. The credits roll. Well, typing it out like this certainly dispels any notion that it's a good movie, but the clinical body horror bits at the end stuck with me and feeling the DVD cover, opening it, seeing it was a complete package, also worked on me. It took me a while to remember I'd watched a light-hearted Robert Redford movie instead. As for the museum gift shop, it had topo maps of jungles, source photographs of A-frame houses made of bamboo suspended over lakes in a jungle, two or three of them connected via walkways, and notated "longest house in the world". There was also a larger version of the map in the DVD case where you could see the couple's clinic, the lady's house, the line of planned houses, etc. Now that I'm awake, I can piece some actual inspiration together but maybe that's not as fun. I'll just leave it like this and maybe I'll read it again some years from now and scratch my head. |
