Patrick

HORROR; 1hr 36min

STARRING: Sharni Vinson, Rachel Griffiths, Charles Dance, Jackson Gallagher

The Roget Clinic is almost comically spooky, housed in a Gothic one-time convent and run by a Nurse Ratched–variety matron (Griffiths), its handful of comatose and mostly unlovely patients overseen by a haughty, unorthodox doctor (Dance) who gets madder virtually by the minute. If we didn’t know from the get-go that Evil is afoot — which we most definitely do, after a grisly intro — the insinuating score, shadowy lighting and gloom-sunk décor reek of rotten omens.

Any sane nurse would gallop for the hills, but not Kathy Jacquard (Vinson). Relationship-burned and dead keen to start afresh, she takes the dispiriting job only to discover that brain-dead yet model-worthy patient Patrick (Gallagher) is very much mentally alive, with terrifying telekinetic powers. He’s also the possessive sort. 

There’s only one road that director Mark Hartley’s creep-show remake of Richard Franklin’s 1978 thriller Patrick (“HE’S IN A COMA … YET, HE CAN KILL”) is set on taking, and it isn’t the high variety: Patrick redux is full-tilt overkill. Gamely sustained by a progressively hysterical Vinson, its sledgehammer tactics refuse to lie down and die.