The Sender (1982)

(In French, On Cable TV, September 2022) While supernatural horror film The Sender dates from the slasher heydays of 1982, there’s something slightly more interesting going on here than a psycho-with-a-knife. Harkening more to the small wave of psi-power thrillers of the late 1970s, it features a young man able to create havoc with his mind—stuck in a psychiatric hospital, and far more troublesome a patient than his initially skeptical doctors can suspect. A few dream sequences blend with reality in weird ways. Much of the film is dull, but there are one or two sequences where director Roger Christian lets loose with the chaotic craziness and the film shows glimpses of what it could have been had it maintained that energy throughout. As it is, The Sender feels uneven—a slow start, an increasingly conventional plot and plenty of missed opportunities often highlighted by intriguing moments. The slightly-more-ambitious directing style works for and against the film in that it helps distinguish it as something more than a cheap thriller, but also slows down the pace of something that would have been more successful as a B-grade genre film. Still, there’s something there that prefigures more oneiric films along the lines of the Nightmare on Elm Street series.