Brian Langston is a disturbed young man, seething with resentment and barely contained violence. Estranged from his father, and over-excused by his mother, he reacts badly when they try to off-set their disappointment at how their son turned out by adopting Aubrey, a young girl eager for the stability of a normal family. At the end of their tether, the parents send Brian to meet with a professional therapist – and then everything goes off the rails, Brian is soon incarcerated, and a sharp downward spiral begins.
The makers of new time-shift slasher Killer Therapy are unlikely to receive plaudits from those working in the field of mental health. This is a film in which mental illness equates to homicidal rage, and mental health practitioners dealing with sufferers are either naïve, delusional or plain wicked.
This is a film that adopts an entirely detached view of its characters, few of which have many redeeming features, and most of which are implicated in some way in the chain of blame that leads to all the stabbing and death.
That might be OK if Killer Therapy had anything interesting to say about the experience either of mental ill-health or its treatment. But any such concerns are quickly set aside to move the plot along, and even the pivotal relationships of the piece (mother-son, brother-sister, patient-therapist) are not explored with any rigour or depth. Even then, Killer Therapy could still succeed if it were a well-executed shocker, but it’s not quite slick enough to pull that off either.
The best conceit of the film is the narrative break that allows the script to explore Brian’s life as a young boy and then as an unhinged adult ex-con. Those early childhood sequences are the best realised and written and contain the strongest performances in the film; both from the youngest actors in the cast. Jonathan Tysor delivers a convincing sense of early teen malevolence as ‘young Brian’, while Ivy George is easily believable as an emotionally resilient ‘young Aubrey’.
Once the film shifts to Brian’s adult years, any enticing sense of doubt about where things might be headed are extinguished, as Killer Therapy runs through some familiar serial retribution killing beats towards a rushed finale. Michael Qeliqi’s turn as ‘grown up Brian’ is intense and committed, but the storyline limits what he can do with the role. There is an extensive canon of horror cinema built around the premise of the murderous ex-offender on a revenge rampage. It’s just not clear what distinctive addition to that genre the makers of Killer Therapy were hoping to claim credit for.
