{Blu-ray Review} A Devil from the Id: Patrick (1978) on Blu-ray from Indicator

“The moment of death is like the blink of an eye.”

Patrick is one of those movies that has been on the periphery of my awareness for what seems like forever but which I had never seen until I received a copy of the new Indicator Blu for review. Notorious as an icon of the so-called Ozploitation surge which followed the introduction of the R-rating in Australia, Patrick is famous for its bizarre logline, its wide-eyed but otherwise inert central character, and the fact that it was a stepping stone film for director Richard Franklin (Psycho 2, Road Games, Cloak & Dagger).

For those who aren’t aware, that bizarre logline is the meat and potatoes of the film. The premise is this: The eponymous Patrick slew his mother and her beau (which we see in the film’s cold opening) and has been in a coma ever since. For the remainder of the film, Patrick, played with crazy-eyed perfection by Robert Thompson, is almost entirely immobile. He can spit, but for the most part he simply lies in bed, eyes wide open, staring straight ahead.

“He’s in a coma,” says the tag line on Letterboxd, “Yet, he can kill.” And that’s the gist of it. Very slowly, the movie makes it clear that Patrick has psychic powers – what we usually call telekinesis and the movie calls psychokinesis. He can influence physical objects. And not just those around him, but at a great distance. He can affect electronic systems, hurl objects, and do even stranger things. It’s suggested that he killed someone in the past with what was essentially a nerve disease created by Patrick’s powers. He makes one character lose feeling in their hands, forces another to eat frogs.

It all sounds wild, and it gets wild, eventually, but Patrick is also one of the slowest burning thrillers ever made – which is perhaps thematically appropriate, for a movie where the villain spends the entire thing in a coma. The accretion of phenomena is steady but definitely comes in a drip, and for much of the film it could easily all be in the head of Patrick’s nurse, Kathy Jacquard, played by Susan Penhaligon. In fact, there were moments where even I wondered if a twist was coming revealing that she was actually the one with psychic powers and was projecting them onto Patrick, even though I knew better.

The booklet that accompanies the Indicator Blu discusses the influence that Alfred Hitchcock had on director Richard Franklin – influence that will perhaps be unsurprising when we remember that Franklin was the director of Psycho 2, some years after making Patrick.

“While at university,” Alan Miller writes in the essay accompanying the Blu, “Franklin was keen to get his hands on a copy of Rope, the director’s 1948 experiment in extended single takes. After putting in a formal request, a few days later he was called out of a lecture to take a phone call. ‘Mr. Franklin,’ asked an unmistakable, sepulchral English voice, ‘why have you asked for a print of my film?’”

Franklin’s indebtedness to Hitchcock’s style is obvious in Patrick, which may owe as much to something like Rope, in its way, as it does to the more apparent Psycho. (That same essay also points out that Patrick’s backstory is “little more than an homage to Psycho.”)

The original backstory proposed by screenwriter Everett De Roche (Razorback, Road Games, etc.) may get at some of the movie’s other themes a bit more succinctly, however. “According to Franklin, screenwriter Everett De Roche wrote Patrick in emulation of The Exorcist,” Alan Miller in that essay again, “but he was also inspired by the true story of a quadriplegic who had attempted to make his wife jealous by staging a suicidal jump, misjudged it, and ended up paralyzed.”

That seems more like something that the men who orbit around Patrick’s nurse and would-be romantic interest would do. Underpinning and underlining all of the gradually escalating tension that makes up this slow burn thriller is the simple fact that the men in Kathy’s life are kind of shits. There’s her estranged husband, who starts out the movie stalking her because he can’t let go and breaks into her apartment and basically rapes her. There’s the oversexed neurosurgeon who has potential as her new love interest but absolutely refuses to support her when she needs him most.

Ultimately, though, it’s less their specific bad behavior than the ways in which all of these men – Patrick perhaps most especially – treat Kathy’s relationship with them as transactional. If they do something to help her, then she owes them something (namely sex, most of the time) in return.

It’s not something that the movie hammers on, but it’s always there. It’s what drove Kathy apart from her husband in the first place, and her frustrations come to a head when she confronts Patrick. “What do you know about love?” she demands, when he claims (via telekinetically-controlled typewriter) that he loves her. She calls him a self-absorbed child who still wants his mother, an accusation that could just as easily be levied at the other men in her life.

This is all in the original Australian theatrical cut of the movie. Like many films of its kind, Patrick was released in a number of different cuts, three of which are included on the Indicator Blu. Among these are the shortened US cut, which re-dubbed the actors to sound less Australian, and the Italian version, which replaced composer Brian May’s score with more giallo-inflected synth music by Goblin, which really changes some of the suspense scenes, though whether for better or worse is probably best left in the ear of the beholder.