• Produced, written, and directed by Michael Ferris Gibson
• Starring
  • Jennifer West Savitch
  • Dominik Overstreet
  • Anne Goldmann
  • Peter Macon
  • Andrew Ableson

The DVD cover proudly compares this movie to Alphaville (1965), THX-1138 (1971), and Stalker (1979). While that’s meant to suggest that this will be thoughtful and stylized independent science fiction, to me it served as a warning that this movie would be sloooow. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; heck, Stalker may have the most glacial pace of any motion picture anywhere ever, but that pace is put to good use and is an essential part of the evocative character of that movie. However, the Numb cover also lists the running time at a spare 77 minutes. If implications about pacing hold true, that means that this will be a slow movie in which very little happens.

It is also, like the above movies, a visually precise feature, using cinematography and composition in place of special effects to evoke its science fictional world. The majority of the movie is shot on crisp, chiaroscuroed black and white film stock; however, the first thing we see is something with the grain and oversaturated colors of an 8mm home movie (actually mini-DV, but who’s counting?), footage of Clare (Mallory Campbell), a young woman, and an older man (Bruce Goodchild) cavorting in a pool and other locales around a mountaintop home.

Howie Mandell says, “You’re doing it wrong!”

It doesn’t take us long to realize that the saturated footage is all flashbacks, and the stark black and white is the present (though even there, scenes shown to us are rarely in chronological order). Enough time has passed since the flashback scenes that Clare is portrayed by a different actress (Jennifer West Savitch); she’s now in the rundown city where it’s always night (or, more plausibly, all of the events of the movie happen in a single night), on a quest to find the man in the flashbacks.

Because of (a) the habit of producer/writer/director Michael Ferris Gibson to focus on the tableau and the deconstructed moment rather than the narrative and (b) the not-quite-sequential manner in which we’re shown scenes, it takes us a while to figure out what’s going on. The city (later identified as “Yerba City”), which appears to be representative of the world at large, is populated entirely by drug addicts. The futuristic pharmaceutical of choice is called “Drip,” which is dispensed in I/V bags (visually arresting, but a poor delivery system for narcotics). Almost everyone wanders around with their own wheeled I/V stand or at least a bag of Drip held at shoulder level. Not that there are many people around; the few remaining citizens seen are congregated in a dilapidated warehouse building, lying on beds and couches, watching silent movie projections while receiving their Drip.

Beakers? Of colored liquids? But that must mean — there’s SCIENCE going on here!

And who do they receive it from? The Angels, of course. That’s the term used for the pasty-faced servitors who administer the facility, all marked with dark triangles on their foreheads (and any movie that brings up memories of The Apple (1980) isn’t doing itself any favors). They’re not artificial, or at least not wholly; they’re the bodies of people who died or were killed, revived and wiped of their former personalities. In the abstract it seems like an insidious form of slavery, but in practice, with the living addicts wholly dependent on the Angels for their most basic needs, one has to wonder which is the master and which is the servant.

In a milieu populated by Drip addicts and Angels, though, Clare isn’t quite the only person left in possession of her faculties. There’s also Miles (Dominik Overstreet) a bald and lean fellow who’s the unofficial but acknowledged master of all he surveys. Miles is one of only a few security personnel retrovirally modified to be immune to the Drip. He’s morally ambivalent; as the last of the security officers, he’s put in the position of the sighted man in the land of the blind, with no ethical qualms about satisfying any appetites, but he’s reined in by the growing awareness that anything he chooses to take in Yerba City isn’t really worth having.

Ah, the life of an Italian superhero…

When Clare flashes the photo at Miles, he says that maybe the man is familiar, and offers to take her searching. Very little searching gets done, though, as far as the fractured narrative lets on; the bits about Miles’ backstory comes out, as well as the origin of the Angels, and everything is interspersed with the saturated flashback footage. There’s also some talk of the “disease” that the Drip was supposed to cure, but as Miles puts it, “There’s a disease. We’re all infected. It’s called life.” (This is one of those movies in which the director’s commentary fills in unintentional gaps in the movie itself. Listening to Gibson’s background on what the disease was supposed to be and how the audience was supposed to have comprehended it, I could only mutter, “You expected me to get that from this?”)

And yes, Clare’s exact relationship with the man, unclear from both the present-day black and white footage and the flashbacks, is finally delineated — at which point one wonders why it was alluded to so coyly.

Obviously this guy is binary-polar. (Ha! Get it?)

Given the production history, I’m suprised that the disparate parts of Numb hold together as well as they do. The main narrative footage was shot in 1996; the flashback sequences were shot in 2003 (with Goodchild as the only actor in common between them), and then the whole thing was edited together in time for a 2006 release by Heretic Films. Although on the surface the flashbacks don’t seem to add much, once you try to subtract them from the finished movie you end up flabbergasted that the movie was originally conceived without that information. Thanks to that footage, we know that Clair’s mysterious man is/was a scientist of some sort, and his work was in some way connected with the Drip. We also get some sense of a close personal connection between the two which would be almost wholly absent from the black and white footage alone, as Clare is pretty much internalized emotionally and tightlipped about the object of her quest. In fact, this pivotal figure would be largely absent from the narrative, limited almost entirely to a couple of flashes of his photograph.

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Freddie Mercury!

After all this talk about the movie, I guess the final question is, Is it compelling? I would have to say no, though it is solidly intriguing. It’s certainly visully arresting, and has that aura of class that only well-limt black and white film can impart. And the script puts natural-sounding dialogue (at least within the standards of the film’s overall stylization) in the mouths of competent actors. But too much effort has been put into deliberately fragmenting the chronological sequence of the story, which puts the brakes on any narrative momentum. And, as with so many independent films (those which wear the word “independent” as an artistic and political banner rather than just a label for the means of production), Numb spends its effort on the trappings of Having Something Deep To Say, and Gibson has good instincts in wielding the tools of cinema to such an end. I would be interested in seeing another film from him, after he’s come up with something to say that’s worth getting out attention for.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 2
• breasts: 1
• pasty male butts: 1
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • Todd Merrill (one of the background Drippers) played “Gleason” in the TNG episodes “Future Imperfect” and “The Best of Both Worlds”