Shock Corridor

An incredibly simple story, at first glance, where a journalist goes to a mental asylum to uncover the truth about a death. From the very beginning, it can be guessed how it will actually turn out, but that doesn't matter at all, because here the journey is incredibly intriguing and inventive. The characters that are here, the scenes that unfold with them, are absolutely unique and it easily engraves into your memory. (02/05/2015)

One moment conceals both madness and triumph of reason and destroys the cliché that separates a genius from a lunatic by an infinitely small distance. On the other hand, the only moment compressing clarity and confusion, colorful image, and the attack of black and white insanity leads us to resolution, victory, and gain - at the cost of loss. The protagonist passes through the gate toward victory, but this victorious arch stands on two pillars... the moment of victory is the moment of the protagonist's defeat. We always achieve our goals, and there is only one path that leads to it. Bogart experienced something similar in Ray's In a Lonely Place, but here the protagonist's actions justified him and destroyed him at the same time, although the merger was only temporary and contingent. Fuller is on a higher level; he shows that the victorious gesture itself leads to defeat, and vice versa. It is a shame that Shock Corridor and its cinéma-direct realistic counterpart Titicut Follies stand in the shadow of something similar in many ways, but much less subversive, even though it may not seem so at first glance, i.e., One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (it’s no coincidence that it was, of course, filmed entirely in "color"...). (05/03/2020)