Set in a strange and mysterious hospital, this amiably ingenious drama constantly wrong-foots the audience
This low-budget film written and directed by Aaron Schimberg is almost every kind of strange, and yet it has an amiable warmth and an inexhaustible reserve of originality that make it compelling as hell. Packed with rambling digressions, sudden shifts of tone, and playful fake-outs as it shuttles between layers of “reality” and performance, but constructed with precision and assurance, it leaves you with both a sugar high and slight sense of nausea.
At a former hospital, a film crew gather to shoot a low-budget comedy-drama-horror movie within the low-budget comedy-drama-horror movie that is Chained for Life itself. A director (Charlie Korsmo), who may actually be German or just faking the Werner Herzog accent, has managed to cast Mabel Fairchild (Jess Weixler), a famous actor up for slumming it in this indie effort as the ingenue in a period work about a mad scientist (Stephen Plunkett) and a hospital full of people with unusual physiognomies, including an extremely tall man, folk with severe burns scars, a pair of conjoined twins, and a “bearded” lady.