By Adam Nayman

Reality, said that 21st-century media guru Nathan Fielder, is what you make of it, and the villainous headshrinker in the Sudbury-shot Fixation advocates what can only be called a Fielderian methodology. Entrusted with a disturbed client who can’t remember her violent crimes (or the reasons for them)—and who is facing a potentially devastating criminal sentence—the experimentally minded (and privately funded) Dr. Clark (Stephen McHattie) compels her towards a series of re-enactments whose boundaries blur the lines between catharsis and cruelty. 

That our institutionalized heroine (played by Malignant [2021] alumnus Maddie Hasson) is named Dora is a pretty good Freudian joke, and Mercedes Bryce Morgan’s film plays smartly with ideas of psychotherapy and hysteria for most of its duration, energizing familiar snake-pit tropes through a fluidly disorienting presentation. If the omnipresent, speed-ramped tracking shots suggest a filmmaker eager to show off, the geographically fractured spaces that the camera hurtles through are superbly designed and realized, and there are a few shock images that stick (including the sickest taxidermy gag since Dead Silence [2007]).In a role that requires plenty of immobilized, semi-conscious thrashing, Hasson darts and rolls her eyes with aplomb while McHattie makes a meal of his avuncular Svengali figure. Always a welcome presence in Canadian movies good, bad, and otherwise, the actor has aged in his seventies into a kind of genre axiom, and one hopes he had as good a time making the film as it seems. 

Adam Nayman