Mark Reviews Movies: CRYO

Cryo, Saban Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 23, 2022

Despite its science-fiction elements and a narrative that's intentionally filled with uncertainty, the actual premise of co-writer/director Barrett Burgin's Cryo is incredibly simple: If you put a certain number of people in a single space, drama will inevitably occur. In this case, the number of people is five, and the space is a dimly lit, decrepit bunker. Those five characters awaken from a cryogenic sleep, as part of an experiment that was created by a seemingly absent or possibly dead inventor. Over the course of some days, suspicion and paranoia emerge, while tenuous alliances and shaky antagonisms form.

It is that simple, even if Burgin and co-screenwriter Mason D. Davis add multiple elements, obstacles, and potential external threats to keep us from seeing through the straightforward game their playing with this scenario. In theory, the characters should matter the most here, as all of them try to figure out who they are, what they're supposed to be doing, and why they're even in this situation in the first place. Those questions, as well as the ways in which the filmmakers can keep them unanswered until the last possible moment, seem to be the core purpose of this story, though, which starts to spin its wheels pretty early.

The more practical components of the setup see those test subjects, each of them at first referred to by the number on coveralls that are waiting outside their respective cryogenic chambers, awaken one at a time. They have no memory of how they got here, what their names are, or what jobs they might have had or are meant to accomplish in this experiment.

They do, though, find that the bunker is short on supplies and filled with evidence that some kind of violence has just occurred before they awakened. After emerging from her chamber and putting on those clothes, Subject #002 (Jylilian Petrie)—who turns out to be a psychiatrist and, like her fellow subjects, is eventually referred to be her job—finds a bloody handprint on a wall and a machete embedded into a wooden door.

Once she and the others are united, they find a pool of fresh blood behind that door, too. Someone was severely wounded or killed in this place, and since there are no signs of injury on any of their own bodies, some of them start to suspect that there's either a another person or a dead body hiding somewhere within the bunker. If they had to guess, that person must be or have been the Inventor.

Another test subject, the Engineer (Curt Coussett), doubts that. He seems to have a bit more knowledge about the experiment and its creator than the others, and he is certain the Inventor must still be around, either watching them nearby or from a safe place, because there's no way he would abandon them.

Burgin and Davis start hinting at the possibilities of the deeper background and/or meaning behind their story fairly early, with references to the Inventor as some invisible but all-seeing figure, the Psychiatrist discovering a copy of The Divine Comedy and a reference to one of the Circles of Heaven (That she doesn't initially think of the other place could be accredited to the memory loss, but it's probably just some deflection from the screenwriters), and an airlock at the top of the stairs of the bunker. Since nobody knows how long they've been asleep, there's a distinct possibility that the outside world has been contaminated by some natural or manmade calamity. Nobody really wants to risk learning, but they might have to.

The other characters here are the Doctor (Emily Marie Palmer), the Soldier (Mason D. Davis), and the Biochemist (Morgan Gunter). They start rationing the limited canned food, throwing accusations when some cans go missing, looking for clues about the purpose of the experiment, and finding many more mysterious pieces to the puzzle of what's happening (a locked storage pantry with an unknown code to get in, a hidden camera and microphone, and a sabotaged cryo chamber, to name the bigger ones). All the while, some of them begin having hallucinations or, as the sick Doctor starts to fear, visions of the future.

The location, with its murky stone surroundings and the industrial minimalism of the technology within it, and drab lighting are admirably restrained. While the performances are convincing in establishing and maintaining the movie's constant sense of unease, there is never really a sense of these characters beyond their broad motives, beliefs, and roles. That's clearly intentional, of course, but a moment in which one of them vocally rebels against being merely a "pawn" basically cuts to the core of the movie's key fault.

It is, essentially, is that, for all of the low-key stakes and restrained storytelling on display here, there is rarely a moment that we can't feel the filmmakers' playing a game of distraction and convolution with us. Cryo quickly starts to feel as if its plotting is simply going around in circles. There is a bigger reason for that, but in spite of the admitted cleverness of that rationale, it is, ultimately, little more than an empty answer to shallow, self-contained questions.

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