“The Power”: night of horror in the hospital

THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WE CAN AVOID

1974. While social conflicts shake Great Britain, causing innumerable power cuts, a young nurse must spend a night on call in an almost deserted hospital. In the darkness of huge corridors and gloomy rooms, terrifying supernatural manifestations torment the young woman and bring to light a buried secret.

Thus summed up, Corinna Faith’s film seems to sacrifice, crudely, to the conventions of classic cinematographic horror. It nevertheless represents a very contemporary and very limited way of dealing with them. Encumbered, henceforth, by immediate societal concerns, a certain new fantastic cinema, of which the film is a perfect sample, stifles all mystery under particularly legible ideological considerations. Rather than opening the doors to a poetic imagination, rather than subverting reality by the force of the drive, the film only allows itself the trivial resolution of all-too-familiar conflicts.

Here, the heroine’s ordeal takes, among other things, the form of an expected denunciation of male power and violence against women. Everything is in The Powerreduced to categories that are too ordinary, too decipherable and, ultimately, too consoling.