Caged
This trippy drama wanders narratively as a man falsely imprisoned for his wife's murder is subjected to cruel isolation and psychological torture.
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"Caged" is one of those movies that works better as an idea than a movie.
Directed by Aaron Fjellman from a script he co-wrote with James "Doc" Mason, it's a harrowing prison drama about a Black man, Harlow Reid, who is wrongfully imprisoned for the murder of his wife. Subjected to constant solitary confinement by an indifferent penal system and psychological torture by a particularly cruel guard, his mind begins to wander through a series of hallucinations that make him come to question his own guilt, and sanity.
What the movie does a good job of is demonstrating the mental strain that prison special housing units, or SHUs, place on the inmates placed there -- often for arbitrary or erroneous reasons. Humans are social animals, and even diehard introverts like me crave interaction.
Without it, we'll eventually break, which is exactly what Harlow does.
The film ends with some information titles about the extent of the impact SHUs have on prisoners, with about a third of them exhibiting serious mental illness after long times in isolating confinement. It seems like the sort of thing better explored in a documentary than a feature film thriller format.
Gathegi is effective as Harlow, who is himself a psychiatrist who knows well the way the mind can deceive us. He's in every scene, often in extreme close-up, and the actor acquits himself well in holding our attention, even with a short running time of 79 minutes. We come to empathize with Harlow, even as we see some of his darker side.
At first it appears to be a standard innocent man story, though as Harlow starts to break down mentally -- hearing, and eventually speaking to voices, seeing a wave of blood flooding his cell, a stain on his wall resembling a face that starts to move -- we see flashbacks to his time with his wife, Amber (Angela Sarafyan), that call into question his actions.
Preparing for a trip on their magnificent sailboat, they seem like a beautiful, idyllic couple at first. Later on, though, we see that Harlow could be manipulative and bordering on abusive. Did this actually happen, or is this the imaginings of his brain as he is subjected to terrible treatment -- a form of blaming himself for what's happening to him?
Melora Hardin plays Officer Sacks, the head guard of the SHU, and boy is she a piece of work. I doubt anyone would recognize her as the lovely Jan from "The Office," with her hair pulled back in a severe bun and her face pocked by a rippling scar that slithers across it.
Perpetually chewing gum and staring at Harlow with dead eyes through the glass slat in his door, Sacks seems intent on ruining his life, whether he's guilty or not. She cuts back his food ration, then spits on it when he complains. She plants razor blades or bits of drugs in his sheets during the brief times he's out of his cell, never mind the impossibility of how anyone could have smuggled something in.
We eventually learn a little more about Sacks, how she got the scar on the outside that's just a shallow reflection of the rips in her soul. She focuses on Harlow as just another example of the men who have harmed her and need payback. Harlow's 90 days in isolation is extended for another 90, and then another, and so on.
Tony Amendola plays the warden, a God-fearing man who wants Harlow to enter some sort of mysterious rehabilitative program that will get him out of the SHU, but only if he admits he is guilty of killing his wife. James Jagger plays Zeke, the white supremacist creep in the next cell who makes a game of tormenting Harlow. Andy Mackenzie does the Voice that Harlow hears, teasing him about conspiracy theories and germs hidden in the lights.
"Caged" is best as a cautionary tale about the dangers of putting people in a tiny room for weeks or months or years on end, and then somehow expecting them to be cured of the impulses that (allegedly) put them in there in the first place. The mind-trippy stuff gets rather old rather fast, and part of me wonders if this feature might have worked better as a short film.