A young athletics coach is knocked down in a traffic accident but matters get far worse when she spends recovery time at the Hopewell Rehabilitation Hospital. Or is it all in her imagination?
Dana Milgrom, the track coach (Shauna Macdonald) loses consciousness before the arrival of the paramedics, and is technically dead in the classic phrase. Anyway, at Hopewell she is cared for by a very irritating character indeed, a rough-and-ready and none too credible male nurse named Trevor, played by comedian Ross Noble.
Meanwhile, husband Steve (Steve Wall) and daughter Gemma (Leah McNamara) visit. Dana is on an artificial ventilator and has lost her powers of speech and communicates through voice recognition software. So lots of clicketty clack on the keyboard and close-ups of the stuff she writes.
Because she believes that someone has been visiting her room at night, closed-circuit TV cameras are installed for her protection. Thus, cameras on top of a laptop, both seriously over-used and decidedly tired cinematic apparatuses at this point to try and tell a story with. But, ha, there is the rub, I think I'm missing the point. These kind of films are not interested in telling much of a story, they are all about effect, plot is way down the list.
Nails essentially follows the current Hollywood schlock-horror template. Top-load your movie with domestic gadgetry, blast the audience's ears with sudden loud noises, produce the odd ghoulish face. I am reminded of some Ethan Hawke dreck from a few years back which was so overloaded with CCTV that a mind-numbing, utterly boring film was the result. Why do the makers of horror movies nowadays feel themselves exempt from decent story? Blinding viewers with science, and rather pedestrian science at that in the shape of laptop and CCTV, only draws attention to the lack of a decent, clever plot.
Anyway, back to the movie. Rummaging around the internet on her hospital bed, Dana discovers that a member of the nursing staff committed suicide in the mid-1980s in the very room in which she is currently installed. Known as Nails for his habit of cutting patients' nails and sealing them in envelopes, the killer was depicted in newspaper headlines as an Angel of Mercy - he had put five seriously-debilitated young girls out of their misery with a hypodermic syringe.
So is the bould Nails the actual night-time intruder back from the dead? So chaotic was the climax involving a frantic midnight escape in a wheelchair as mother does a runner with the aid of daughter that your reviewer cannot answer that question.
Maybe I’m just slow. Or maybe there’s gonna be a sequel, perhaps also funded by The Irish Film Board. Nails just wasn’t my kind of film.
Paddy Kehoe
