7.1/10
61%
73%
53%
3.8/5
72%
This a a John Carpenter film I have never seen before for some strange reason, which is even weirder as it also stars the wonderful Sam Neil. This massive error has now been rectified as I’ve watched In the Mouth of Madness as one of the 31 film for Halloween season.
We start off with a straight-jacketed man being dragged into a mental institution. After a very unsubtle escape attempt that results in him kicking one of the orderlies in the balls (which he does apologise for at least), they get him to his cell where he’s left amongst the other screaming prisoners.
A short while later the man, who we discover is an insurance investigator named John Trent, is visited by a doctor involved with the police — it’s not 100% clear why he wants to see John at this point, but something is happening in towns and cities across the country and John may be linked to it somehow.
Using a black crayon, John has covered his entire cell, his clothes and his body in crosses and is now more than happy to be in his padded cell claiming that it’s safer in there than it is outside in the “real” world.
The doctor (played by the also wonderful David Warner) sits down as asks John to tell him his story and we’re taken back to a time before he was dumped in the psychiatric ward, although it’s not quite clear how long ago these events took place.
John was a successful freelance insurance investigator, often saving his employers millions of dollars over fraudulent claims. As he’s sitting down to lunch to discuss a new case, a man carrying an axe bursts through the restaurant window seemingly looking for John. Before he can reveal why, he’s shot dead by police.
John takes the new job: an author has gone missing and his latest book and film launch has been delayed costing the publishers a lot of money. John, being his usual suspicious self, thinks that this is nothing but a publicity stunt in order to drive up sales.
The author, Sutter Cane, is bigger than Stephen King selling millions of books, and what better way to drive up demand than to have the author disappear under mysterious circumstances? The publisher, Jackson Harglow (Charlton Heston who used to be wonderful) is adamant that it’s not a stunt and that something must be wrong. Only a few pages of the new novel were sent to Cane’s agent and he decided to go on an axe wielding spree before being killed — yes, the agent was the axe man from the start of the film.
This piques John’s interest and he agrees to take the case, still thinking that it’s a stunt and the death of the agent was a tragic coincidence. Harglow, and Cane’s editor Linda Styles, warns John that Cane’s books seem to have an affect on some of the readers causing them to see things. I personally have to ask: If that’s the case, would they continue publishing the books for fear of a mass lawsuits? I guess money trumps sanity.
John’s never read a Cane book before so heads to a local bookshop (remember those?) in order to pick a few of them up and see what all the fuss is about. After reading them and having an odd vision of a disfigured cop beating a man alongside some frightening dreams, John realises that the covers of the book are a puzzle. Putting them together he believes that Cane has left a clue about his location.
When John puts the covers together, they form a map of New England and seem to show the location of Hobbs End, the fictional town that Cane sets his stories in. Wanting to prove that this is all a set-up, John heads out on a road trip, accompanied by Cane’s editor Styles, to find the real town behind Hobbs End.
After seemingly being lost for hours, the pair finally enter Hobbs End where characters and elements from the books exist in reality — well, the adage is “write what you know” so maybe that’s what Cane has been doing, turning the residents and town of Hobbs End into his own works of fiction.
Things start to get really weird after John and Styles find Cane. He’s holed up in a strange demonic-looking church and it’s obvious that something is very, very wrong. After the meeting, Styles goes back to the church and returns to the hotel a changed woman, literally.
With things in the town imploding, Styles turned into some otherworldly hideous creature, and a baying mob after him, John tries to flee the town, but Cane has other ideas.
Will John escape Hobbs End? What are Cane’s plans for his magnum opus? And if it gets out, what will that mean for the rest of society?
What If Insanity Is The Majority?
🎃Warning! Spoilers for In The Mouth Of Madness ahead!📖
I think a short chat between Styles and John sums up what’s happening in the film quite well:
John: Whoa, whoa, whoa, we’re not talking about reality here. We’re talking about fiction, it’s different, you know?
Styles: A reality is just what we tell each other it is. Sane and insane could easily switch places, if the insane were to become the majority. You would find yourself locked in a padded cell, wondering what happened to the world.
John: No, that wouldn’t happen to me.
Styles: Well, it would if you realized everything you ever knew was gone. It’d be pretty lonely being the last one left.
The irony, of course, is that this is what happens to John. The world is going mad thanks to Sutter Cane’s words, both in his books and spoken by “actors” on screen.
This is a fantastic film that gets to the heart of what is real and what is fantasy, what seems real to you might seem fake to me, and vice versa.
John enters Hobbs End a sceptic, and escapes a victim of the world it’s a part of. When he returns to civilisation and meets with Harglow to warn him about the book and Cane’s motivations it turns out that he already handed over the manuscript the previous spring, and the book has been in stores for seven weeks!
What happened to John’s missing time isn’t known, we don’t know how long he spent in Hobbs End, how long he spent in his safe padded cell, time is a construct that is created by…. Well, that’s the question isn’t it? Did John lose time because he had a mental break? Or was it because Sutter Cane wrote him out of the story until it was convenient?
And what happens to Cane once the entire world becomes insane due to his work? What then? With no one else to infect what is there to do?
This isn’t a film to watch if you want answers handed to you on a plate, instead it leaves us to question our relationships with reality and how we accept things presented to us in written and film form — and this questioning is even more relevant (and necessary) with the rise of A.I generated content where anything can be created to look real if you have enough money, or enough patience.
I don’t normally sit thinking about what I’ve just seen as most modern films wrap everything up in a neat little bow for you by the end of the final act.
But with In The Mouth Of Madness it really made be think, long after the credits rolled and into the next day as I tried to put together my thoughts to write this review. And while some thing make a bit more sense to me now, I still have questions. And that’s the point of a good piece of art, right? And the entire point of In The Mouth Of Madness — it asks us to question how we interact with content and whether by consuming it, we become a part of it.
Or maybe I’m reading too much into this? Maybe this is just a film about a horror writer and an insurance investigator that folds under the pressure with the entire film taking place in his head because he wants to be the main character in his own story.
What do you think? Is Sutter Cane writing the reality of the whole world? Or is John Trent truly insane and the events in the film are just a product of his deranged imagination? Let me know in the comments below.
Watch this film if you want to be left with more questions than answers, or think that old ladies are NOT really sweet and people need to be made aware of how evil they are.
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