Pin

1988
Dir. Sandor Stern

As children, Leon and Ursula Linden (David Hewlett and Cynthia Preston) are taught important life-lessons by their emotionally vacant ventriloquist father (Terry O’Quinn), who demonstrates with his medical doll ‘Pin’ – as in Pinocchio. When their parents are killed in a car crash, things take a turn for the dark and twisted as Leon becomes obsessed with Pin; eventually dressing the life-size doll in his dead father's clothes and insisting that visitors to the house meet him. Eventually Pin begins telling Leon what to do. And who to kill…

A PLASTIC NIGHTMARE!

Opening with a placid, vaguely spooky piano score, and exhibiting a stately creepiness akin to those melodramatic made-for-TV thrillers we all love so much, Pin gradually unfolds as an intriguing and fascinating psychological study of a young man’s descent into madness, brought about by his stifling childhood, emotionally vacant parents and an inability to relate to anyone other than an anatomy doll. Absurd, but also tragic and creepily unnerving, Pin will most likely not resemble anything you’ve ever seen before.

As the emotionally detached parents, Terry O’Quinn and Bronwen Mantel provide convincing performances that never veer into cheap melodrama. They ensure their perpetually simmering emotions are kept in check, just beneath boiling point, and tension comes from the possibility that they could explode into a devastating fit of rage at any moment. The early scenes which introduce us to the Linden family exude a sterile, odd atmosphere that proves quite taut. To begin with, Pin resembles a rather dark Hallmark family drama, complete with teenage pregnancy, domestic violence and child abuse. The focus of the script though remains squarely on the psychological turmoil the youngsters undergo at the hands of their parents. The mother has covered all the furniture with plastic sheets (a plastic nightmare indeed!) and she and her husband handle the children as though they were brittle dolls – no affection or warmth is shared, the relationships are all cold, clinical and sterile.

The scene where a young Leon spies on his father’s medical colleague as she uses Pin to achieve an orgasm, is decidedly uneasy and charts the beginning of Leon’s obsession with the titular doll. As the quiet and confused Leon, Hewlett provides just the right amount of restrained aggression and quiet menace. He lingers between 'overly protective older brother' and 'unsteady psychopath'. As the long-suffering sister, Cynthia Preston is likable and grounded.

Throughout, Stern creepily exploits the Freudian notion of 'the uncanny' - where something can be familiar, yet totally alien at the same time, making it all feel uncomfortably strange. Like all good 'evil dolls' in horror films, Pin looks immensely creepy. The tension generated by myriad glimpses of him just sitting in a chair is highly effective. (Spoiler alert!) The scene in which the parents are killed in a car crash is also rife with slow building tension, enhanced by the shots of the doll 'sitting up' in the back seat. After the death of the parents, an aunt with a health condition comes to stay. She dies of a heart attack when startled by Pin in a scene that manages to be quite tense, chilling and mildly ridiculous all at once! In a moment reminiscent of Dario Argento’s Tenebrae, Pin rises up from behind the bed where the dead aunt lies, only for Leon to then rise up from behind him creating the impression that he is emerging from within the doll, shedding it like skin.

While the premise of co-habiting siblings whose relationship is slowly deteriorating recalls Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Pin never traverses that far into parody or camp, though it is not without its moments of black comedy and absurdity. One moment that destroys the uneasy tension* is a brief and incredibly cheesy montage of Leon and Pin ‘hanging out’ as their friendship blossoms. When Leon and Marsha (Helene Udy) get back to his house after an awkward date, the lights go off and Pin menaces her in the dark in a moment that proves as ridiculous as it is creepy. Locked in the house, Marsha becomes increasingly panicked and is chased around in the dark from room to room by Pin in a wheelchair. Why she doesn’t just go upstairs is anyone’s guess. In a cheeky reference to Canadian genre cinema, the film they watched in the cinema is Scanners.

The gathering psychosis at the dark and twisted heart of this dysfunctional family is perfectly demonstrated in the scene where Leon insists upon reading some poetry after dinner. Gathered around the fire, Ursula and her date Stan (John Pyper-Ferguson) listen with increasing concern and horror as Leon recites one of his recent poems – a disturbing and revelatory meditation on rape and incest. The ending, as foreshadowed in the opening scene, is (shock horror) a tad ludicrous, but if you’ve invested in the story, it should be curiously effective. Pin is a disturbing, blackly humorous and unconventional psycho-drama with lashings of creepy atmosphere and some pretty decent characterisation.

*or suggests this is the wildest film ever made: you decide.