Session 9 (2001) on Netflix
Gordon Fleming takes a job stripping asbestos from a shuttered Massachusetts asylum, with a week to finish. Mike, one of his crew, finds nine audiotapes of a former patient's therapy sessions.
- Netflix3.1/5
- IMDb6.3/1067,951 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes64%
Trailer
Plot summary
Gordon Fleming owns a small asbestos abatement company in Massachusetts and needs the work, so he bids to strip the asbestos from Danvers State Hospital, a psychiatric facility shut in 1985, and promises to finish inside a week. He and his partner Phil recruit Hank, Mike and Jeff to meet the schedule. Phil resents Hank over a girlfriend; Mike dropped out of law school and knows the asylum's history; Jeff, Gordon's nephew, is afraid of the dark. Gordon has an infant daughter and trouble at home with his wife Wendy, and while he surveys the site a voice greets him by name. Mike comes upon a box marked Evidence holding nine recordings of psychiatric interviews with Mary Hobbes, once a patient there, and he begins listening to them.
Cast
- Charley Broderickas Security Guard (as Charles Broderick)
- Jurian Hughesas Mary Hobbes (voice)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Session 9 (2001)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Principal photography began in mid-September 2000 at the dilapidated Danvers State Hospital, where the film is set; actor David Caruso said the cast and crew were limited to certain portions of the building as much of it was "unsafe", and that the sets largely did not need dressing because all the props were already there.
SPOILER
Cinematographer Uta Briesewitz, operating a handheld camera, was injured after running into a medical cart abandoned in the tunnel, striking her face on the metal prong of a surgical device that punctured the camera's eyecup and the corner of her eye socket, nearly piercing her eye. The injury paralleled Hank's eventual demise by a transorbital lobotomy.SPOILER
Anderson shot a finale in which the woman, after fearfully witnessing Gordon murder each member of his crew, confronts him in Mary Hobbes's cell and bludgeons him to death with a flashlight; he called it a "misdirect" and cut it because audiences incorrectly assumed the character to be Mary Hobbes.- The plot was inspired by a 1995 murder in Boston, where Anderson grew up, in which a man murdered his wife after she accidentally burnt his dinner, then cut out her heart and lungs and put them in his backyard on a stake.
- Anderson and Gevedon pitched a prequel to the film in 2020 following the Mary Hobbes character, but the rights holder, Focus Features, a Universal Pictures subsidiary that had acquired USA Films shortly after the film's release, would not allow it.
- Session 9 was one of the first motion pictures to be shot in 24p HD digital video, which shoots at 24 frames per second like film, as opposed to regular digital video, which shoots at 30 frames per second.
- Session 9 grossed a total of $378,176 in the United States, but was a greater financial success abroad, earning $1.2 million in international markets.
