Headspace (film)

Plot

A young genius becomes obsessed with beating a chess wizard. He has a mind which uses far more of his frontal lobes than any normal person which means he can memorise a book in seconds. It also causes him to have fits which endanger his life. It is something to do with his mother who had a similar genius which turned her mad and forced her husband to kill her to save himself and their two sons. Psychiatric treatment does not seem to be working for him and meanwhile a monster is killing the people he knows. Although it is not revealed till near the end, you will quickly guess that the chess genius is his long lost brother. What is puzzling though is does the monster really exist or is it just a product of his imagination, and if so, how is it killing people?

Release

Headspace: The Director's Cut will release via cable and video on demand in North America on April 24 and via DVD & Blu-ray on 19 June 2012.

Critical reception

Neil Genzlinger of The New York Times:

Not that it's a bad movie, particularly; it has all the necessary gore and beasties and gratuitous nudity that this not-very-demanding genre demands... None of this is very scary, but William M. Miller's cinematography and those big-name cameos keep it interesting.

From TV Guide:

While neither especially chilling nor particularly unpredictable, van den Houten's debut, scripted by Steve Klausner from a story by Troy McCombs and William M. Miller, aspires to little more than the usual stalk-and-slash clichés, it features a number of nice touches, including a knowing nod to H. P. Lovecraft's classic short story Pickman's Model and a slew of familiar faces in small roles, such as Udo Kier as a spooky priest and Dee Wallace-Stone and William Atherton as baffled doctors.