It takes up to four men to restrain Emile Hirsch in \u201cState of Consciousness,\u201d a soul-draining psychological thriller about a falsely accused man (Hirsch) who keeps getting medicated and harassed against his will. Hirsch plays Stephen, a manic gas station clerk, car mechanic, and former military-man whose life is ruined after the cops find a dead body in a car that was left at Stephen\u2019s filling station. Stephen doesn\u2019t know anything about that, but he can\u2019t beat the charges against him either since his fingerprints all over the car.<\/p>\n
Stephen pleads insanity, using an old psychiatric misdiagnosis to make his case. Because at one point, a doctor said (off-camera) that Stephen showed \u201csigns of bipolar disorder and paranoid schizophrenia.\u201d Stephen now says that he actually had \u201cminor [Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder].\u201d In any case, Stephen\u2019s soon imprisoned in a psychiatric facility, where he\u2019s restrained (by only two men) and then injected with a big syringe. He spends the rest of the movie running away and\/or struggling to regain control of reality as he knows it. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s somewhat difficult to judge \u201cState of Consciousness\u201d without considering both Hirsch\u2019s self-pitying role and twitchy performance. He\u2019s become a prolific star of low-budget Video-On-Demand genre movies, like the dismal 2021 horror thriller \u201cSon\u201d and the sub-\u201cPulp Fiction\u201d art world crime caper \u201cAmerican Night\u201d (also 2021). <\/p>\n
In real life, Hirsch also pleaded guilty to charges of aggravated assault in 2015 and spent 15 days in jail. You might be able to watch \u201cState of Consciousness\u201d without thinking about what Stephen\u2019s behavior says about Hirsch. You\u2019ll still be left with a drab and unpleasant psychodrama where the main character tumbles from one frame-up to the next, and always in a way that confirms that yes, Virginia, the world really is out to specifically get Stephen and destroy his peace of mind. <\/p>\n
That\u2019s not a bad premise for a B-movie, nor is Hirsch\u2019s broad performance necessarily inappropriate. I\u2019m still amazed at how lifeless Stephen\u2019s trials often are. A revealing and memorably disturbing moment comes about partway through the movie, when a major character is crushed to death by a motel sign that randomly smashes through the ceiling. The sparking letters on the sign say, \u201cThe Last Stop Motel,\u201d which is sort of a joke. <\/p>\n
Stephen is so laughably passive that he has to shoot another side character in the head just to prove that he\u2019s not a total pushover. That\u2019s not a spoiler though since the makers of \u201cState of Consciousness\u201d also frequently break up Stephen\u2019s more violent confrontations with blackouts and other sudden breaks from the movie\u2019s linear reality. The big payoff, where we find out why Stephen\u2019s being so thoroughly flogged, is hilariously underwhelming. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It takes up to four men to restrain Emile Hirsch in \u201cState of Consciousness,\u201d a soul-draining psychological thriller about a falsely accused man (Hirsch) who keeps getting medicated and harassed against his will. Hirsch plays Stephen, a manic gas station clerk, car mechanic, and former military-man whose life is ruined after the cops find a …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[37],"class_list":["post-1217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thriller-movies","tag-thriller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1217\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}