The Facility (2019) by Matt Mitchell

Director: Matt Mitchell

Year: 2019

Country: United Kingdom

Alternate Titles: The Rizen: Possession

Genre: Creature Feature

Plot:

Arriving at a derelict military bunker, a team of soldiers is sent in to observe what happened to others who used the facility before, and while exploring the bunker, find it overrun by the remnants of an Allied experiment years ago during the war, and must get out of the area alive.

Review:

Overall, this was a decent enough, if somewhat challenging, genre effort. Among the better features of this one is the attempts at providing this with the kind of solid starting point for a solid Action/Horror hybrid that it desperately wants to be. The main storyline involving the military team assigned to investigate a seemingly abandoned military bunker that only the leader knows the truth about and eventually finding that the whole thing was a ruse to bring them into a specific experimental facility that was used for these occult sacrifices, and must now fight their way out of it, makes for a fun enough time here. This offers enough intriguing starting points with the usually secretive military operation that reveals nothing about what’s going on, and taking the group into the darkened, twisting corridors and hallways of the bunker where occult happenings are involved, is a fun way to get this started, since the team encountering the different supernatural beings out of nowhere is a fine motivation for getting the different encounters throughout here realized.

These encounters, while quite exciting and thrilling in how they’re presented in that the darkness hides the full extent of the deformed creatures coming out in swarms to attack and ambush the team, who are then forced to rely on their firepower to get to safety, do have some problematic features. Those first few situations here featuring the team seeing the blind, bandaged patients going about taking out the team in shock appearances and later turning them into more figures like them are immensely chilling and atmospheric, setting the stage for the gunfights and shootouts to come. Knowing the team is outnumbered and forced to take care of the explorers who are also inside the bunker, there’s a solid sense of survival in the building, but it’s done at the expense of including the team of explorers for no reason. While it would’ve made sense for this to be a body-count factor in adding extra victims and generating some fun that way, this instead makes it unclear whether or not they’re involved in the same timeline until way too late in the film, never makes their mission clear, and never bothers making them interesting enough to warrant being there when the rescue team is already a serviceable storyline.

On top of that, there’s little in the way of making the film serve itself well if you’re not familiar with the first entry. This makes it abundantly clear that elements from the first one are useful in navigating the myriad of revelations and other features present within here, yet it’s all reliant on context from the first part to make sense of it all. Rather than trying to make a different take on the material or try to expand on the mythology, very little here is new information, as instead there’s far more confusion than anything else within this one. Nothing here about the various experiments or psychiatric treatments makes sense without the context of the original to fill in what’s going on and why, and as a standalone feature, it’s rather complicated and confusing. The other detrimental factor here is the inherently lame finale, which exists merely to set up a third part of the franchise and doesn’t work at all in this kind of feature, leading to a wholly confusing time trying to get the action throughout here to make sense. Combined with the low-budget limitations, there are some issues with this one.

Overview: *.5/5

A rather frustrating and problematic follow-up, there are some worthwhile features within this one, which are mostly overwhelmed and held off by the majority of the flaws present here. Those with an interest in this kind of genre fare or who are fans of the first one will have the most to like here, while most others out there might want to heed extreme caution.