Director Lorcan Finnegan has been delivering quality movies full of strangeness for a few years now. I wasn't a big fan of Without Name, but I did like the wild ride that was Vivarium. I also recommend the short film he did just over a decade ago, Foxes. Knowing that he was once again working with long-time collaborator Garret Shanley, who has been his main collaborator as far back as that aforementioned short, and that there was a central role for Eva "I don't really do sane" Green, I was optimistic about this one.
Green plays Christine, a fashion designer who has spent some time suffering from a mysterious illness. It makes her home life difficult, where she lives with her husband, Felix (Mark Strong), and their young daughter, Bobs (Billie Gadsdon). So everyone should be relieved when some home help arrives in the shape of Diana (Chai Fonacier), a Filipino woman that Christine cannot recall actually hiring. Diana seems to be able to help Christine, but Felix suspects that she's up to something. As the story is fleshed out, viewers also start to wonder about her, but it's hard to keep track of what the truth is, especially as Christine suffers from episodes where she cannot trust her own mind.
Standard stuff in many ways, especially when you think of the classic psychological thrillers that are centred on a "hysterical" woman, Nocebo is a solid script by Shanley that is turned into a slippery and twisty fever-dream by Finnegan, making use of nightmare imagery mixed with elements that are shown to be very deliberate choices by the time the grand finale comes around, and what a finale it is. I can understand people being put off by the confusion of the middle section, a lot of ambiguity and subterfuge without any apparent motivation or endgame in sight, but I'd encourage everyone to simply enjoy the oppressive and disorientating atmosphere on the way to a very satisfying payoff.
Green does so well in the kind of role that you'd expect her to do so well in, allowed to occasionally lean hard into the kind of physical acting and raw emotional outbursts that she has shown us a few times already. Strong is a good choice for the husband role, being an anchor trying to keep his wife safe during turbulent times, but also bringing with him the baggage of his filmography. I am always happy to see Strong appear onscreen . . . but trusting him is another matter entirely. Fonacier is excellent, acting overly sweet and delicate for a lot of the runtime, but showing a steely determination and strong will when she has to. As for Gadsdon, she gets better as the film allows her to move from bratty child to understandably perplexed and worried child.
Although I wish that this went further, with both the scares and the thematic layering, there's another part of me that thinks, yes, both Finnegan and Shanley knew exactly what they were doing. That is why they made this movie, and why I am just sitting here writing up my thoughts on it. I still prefer the more extreme strangeness of Vivarium, only slightly, but Nocebo is another excellent film that allows Finnegan to remain someone that film fans should always be valuing for his growing body of thrills and horror.
7/10
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