Disquiet (2023)

1 Star (out of 4)

Judgmental Hospital

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

An intriguing premise for a thriller is wasted with thin characters, awful dialogue, overly-aggressive line-readings, and an overall, general confusion as to what this was all supposed to be about.

Sam (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) has a beautiful wife (Anita Brown) and a baby on the way. But he's also managing a startup and can't barely tear himself away from work. While texting and driving, he's hit by a drunk driver and winds up in the hospital. He wakes up, some time later, and the hospital seems to be abandoned.

A strange man in the bed across the way attacks him, and then disappears. He comes across others who seem to be in the same situation as him, but they also come and go. There's no cell service, no way to get out of the building, and outside the windows, it's completely dark. What's going on, and can Sam get back to his life?

Written and directed by Michael Winnick, Disquiet is filled with clunky bricks of dialogue — sounding like they were run through Google translate — which characters hurl at one another with much force. Characters do not listen to each other, nor do they talk. They just shout. With writing of this kind, there's no wonder that we have no real idea who Sam or any of the other characters are, nor do we have any idea what's going on.

A character called Monica (Elyse Levesque) is in the hospital for plastic surgery, and the movie seems to ridicule her, just as it takes seriously a situation in which a White cop (Lochlyn Munro) shoots an innocent Black man (Trezzo Mahoro). But nothing is quite as confusing as Disquiet's ending, which seems to be going for poignancy, but will leave viewers frustrated and possibly shouting angrily at the screen.