Psycho crazy Serial killer Jeffrey Pryor for the benefit of society is placed in a psychiatric hospital of a closed type, where the forced process of either treatment in the spirit of old-Soviet punitive psychiatry, or its total destruction, however, for purely humane reasons, begins over him; let there be a clean sheet than this meat bestiary, whose actions eclipsed Damer and Spesivtsev. Meanwhile, he does not get better, rather the opposite: the galloping regression of Jeff’s personality under the pressure of the confined space of the hospital makes an unprecedented pace of jerks, and the maniac, who was not yet distinguished by one hundred percent mental health, begins to completely plunge into the pool of his own terrifying visions, nightmares and memories.
The film “I never left the white room” 2000 American underground director Michael Todd Schneider, who acted in this debut film as the cameraman, screenwriter, editor and lead actor, with all desire can not be considered from the standpoint of the usual cinematic perception. Released three years before the brutal bacchanalia of the “August underground” and significantly influenced Fred Vogel and Co., who formulated not only the theory, but also the practice of pseudo-snuff in an American way (shooting on an ordinary camera, horrific cruelty and acid filters, sometimes frankly lubricating generous tinnitus), the film work of Michael Todd Schneider, with all the shocking methods available to the author, breaks the wall between absolute nightmare and pacified drug bliss. Between the nature of the inner chaos of the perfect madman and the consistent author’s immersion to where there is and can be no salvific return. And redemption, and even more remorse - after the fact, the viewer of this ultra-hard picture witnesses the complete disintegration of the personality, beginning with small, and ending on an extremely hysterical note: worse, worse, quite bad - the prison cell is transformed into a torture chamber, then into a brothel where all 120 pleasures are available, then into the very eve of Hell, where necrophilia and self-eating become the norm. The monsters inside devour the monster on the outside, there is no clean slate. And this extreme state of finally leaving sanity, the director fixes with genuine, and therefore even more unpleasant sensuality, enjoying the monotonous death of his character. Transferring to film, often twitched by interference, unusual angles and sophisticated violence, all the hell that was inside Jeffrey Pryor, but gradually materialized.
The director hardly wants his character to be regretted; Michael Todd Schneider does not pursue such an inappropriate goal at all, since at the center of the almost plotless narrative is the most detailed description of the intolerable state of Jeffrey Pryor, which passes the point of no return. The film language of Schneider’s film, torn into patches of psychedelics, surrealism and necrorealism, contextually rhymes with the outrageous creations of Viennese actionists and the synephile experiences of the forefathers of industrialism, linking into a single semantic knot that the ever-memorable “Cocci – a running doctor” and “Green elephant” Svetlana Baskova, “Freaks” Mavromatti and “First transmission” of Monteza etc. And this underground film context dominates in I Never Left the White Room to such an extent that the extreme sometimes harshness of some scenes is perceived as nothing more than outrageous for the sake of outrage, as the final abolition of the boundaries allowed to please the anti-aesthetic admiration of the chthonic agonizing kinetics of the dying reflexion of someone who never left the white room, but it was smeared from ceiling to floor with crimson streams of blood and decorated with garlands of juic fresh flesh.