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Delirium(2018), directed by Dennis Illiadis from a script by Adam Alleca; starring Topher Grace, Patricia Clarkson, and Genesis Rodriguez.
Delirium is a modestly budgeted indie film produced by Leonardo DiCaprio. Whether by design or accident, it bears a lot of resemblance to Martin Scorcese’s Shutter Island (2010), which starred DiCaprio in the lead role.
Like Shutter Island— and Jacob’s Ladder, Mulholland Dr., A Tale of Two Sisters, and many others I could name—this film has an unreliable narrator as the main character.
Tom Walker, played by Topher Grace (all grown up from That 70s Show) is in his thirties, but has been incarcerated in a mental institution since the age of 12. He is recently released from the institution, after officials declared that he's "cured."
Set free from the insitution, the only place he has to go is the house where his wealthy father died only a week previously. Grotesquely, the father was found dead by his own hand, with his face-half eaten by the family dog.
His father’s house is a huge gated mansion with an indoor swimming pool in the basement. He is dumped off there by Officer Brody, a tough-talking female parole officer, played by ace character actress Patricia Clarkson.
Since he missed most of the past twenty years, Tom’s mentally stuck in the late 90s. He doesn’t know about smartphones, mp3 players, or social media. Left to his own devices, he consumes kid-food like Fruity Pebbles cereal, grape juice boxes, and ice cream. He sacks out on the floor of his old childhood bedroom after he finds Dad's master suite too creepy for habitation, and decorates the empty room with 90s posters he finds in a box with his name on it, including a pin-up of 90s supermodel Kathy Ireland.
Under the terms of his release, Tom is confined to the house for thirty days by an electronic device, and has to check in with the police every morning, or else they will raid the house.
From the moment he’s left alone in the house by Brody, Tom begins to see and hear strange things. He sees the family dog eating his dead father’s face; he sees someone entering his bedroom from a secret keyhole behind his bedroom wall; perhaps most disturbingly, he finds a severed human tongue in a jar in a utility box in the pool room.
His only contact with the outside world--aside from Brody--is Lynn, a delivery girl who brings Tom his ice cream and Fruity Pebbles from the nearby supermarket/drugstore. Tom is smitten with Lynn and they begin a relationship of a sort.
As the plot unfolds, we find that as a child, Tom was forced by his psycho big brother, Alex, to watch while Alex drowned a teenage girl in the pool. Tom was judged an accomplice in the killing and sent to the institution at age 12, while Alex was sent to a maximum security prison.
Later, Tom hears from Brody that Alex escaped during a prison fire and is on the loose. Lo and behold, Alex is discovered as the one making creepy noises in Tom's house. Alex also has murderous designs on Lynn.
This sets up a conflict as Tom tries to fight Alex for Lynn’s life, ultimately culminating in a great set piece involving the indoor pool and its surrounding creepy passageways and rooms. Tom also discovers the origin of the severed tongue in a fairly original “twist.”
Production Values Above Average for an Indie
This film has great sets and production design. The mansion is decorated in an over-the-top, surreal manner, with spooky statues everywhere and a sickly color scheme of black, acid green, and skin-bruise blue.
Grace is good as the beleaguered man-child Tom, and the suspenseful scenes involving Alex are well-done. However, as with almost all unreliable narrator films, it’s left to the viewer to decide exactly what is real and what is a figment of Tom’s fractured mind. Is Alex real? Is Lynn real? Is the severed tongue real? Is everything that happens just an allegory for all the traumatic events of Tom's life?
There’s plenty of evidence that could go either way, and no resolution for viewers who like their plot points all tied up in a neat bow.
Ultimately, though, Delirium’s main flaw is that it doesn’t add anything to the unreliable narrator genre that hasn’t been done to death by other, better films (such as the ones I pointed out in the beginning of this piece.)
The canny reviewer tends to wonder why it was made at all. Did DiCaprio think he could out-film Martin Scorcese?
