Michael Mongillo (director)
(studio)
18 (certificate)
85 (length)
27 August 2021 (released)
27 August 2021
Opening with an ominously friendly tv message that ‘Change is coming’ we are thrust straight into the situation: that things aren’t quite right and people have actually changed.
Bill (Tony Todd) and Mac (Jason Alan Smith) are in mid conversation when a jogger Sara (Olivia Freer) stares at Mac. It’s all a bit odd. This oddness has also been noted by Kim (Clare Foley) a local teenager friendly with Mac and Jane (Carlee Avers) Mac’s wife, a nurse who is subjected to harassment from a colleague at work who tries to kiss her.
Then the sirens go off with government advice to hit the shelters or stay in. Kim, Mac and Jane now joined by a very agitated Kurt (Doug Tompos), Kim’s uncle.
Bill returns acting very suspiciously then attacking Mac. He’s overcome and now tied up in the basement he starts to extol the virtues of his change, which is a total calmness of thought and outlook with little or no responsibility or say, in anything, and that they too must succumb.
All their troubles are gone, in fact everything has been and they are little more than shells. Meanwhile Sara is back is joined by the other changed and surrounding the house.
It’s not a new concept from director Michael Mongillo, co-written with Matt Gianni as there’s something of Invasion of the Body Snatchers about it. However those films as they were remade over the decades chimed with the political paranoia (or not) of the time.
There’s less of that in The Changed which looks more toward the basic mechanics of a film which is the development of tension, some action and getting the best out of the actors. And they are fine with effective claustrophobic scenes in the house, with some very creepy ones outside as the neighbourhood gather on the lawn, in formation.
However, it’s not bereft of politics or philosophy, dabbling as it does with the concepts of freewill with the minefield of contradictions that holds. And that for some of the characters there is comfort in choosing to be changed and freed of any cares and worries, is a price worth paying.
