Black Box is one among four new scary-season films debuting on Amazon Prime this month lumped under the Welcome to the Blumhouse banner. Y’all know horror mainstay Blumhouse as the production company bankrolling everything from Paranormal Activity to Paranormal Activity 2, from Paranormal Activity 3 and Paranormal Activity 4 — and also non-Paranormal fare like Get Out and The Invisible Man. Point being, it’s a logo representing silly cheapo stuff AND wily knockout thrillers, so be thankful we’re here to tell you which is what.
The Gist: Six months ago, the odds were not in Nolan’s (Mamoudou Athie) favor. He was in a car wreck that killed his wife and left him brain dead — until he inexplicably recovered. “An anomaly” reads his medical record. Now, he’s an amnesiac, and daughter Ava (Amanda Christine), who’s maybe nine or 10 and very precocious, is his de-facto caretaker, helping him remember things, making dinner, etc. He’s a photographer, but the newspaper where he was employed doesn’t think his work is up to snuff anymore. He’s lost.
Nolan visits his doctor pal Gary (Tosin Morohunfola), who works down the hall from the neuroscientist who’s been courting him for experimental treatment, Dr. Lillian (Phylicia Rashad). She promptly hypnotizes him until he’s in a place that’s a lot like the sunken place, except it’s also sort of a spotless mind. Next thing you know, she straps him into a chair and oversized VR goggles, which will help him plumb the depths of his subconscious for his old lost memories. They’ll be exactly how they’re supposed to be, Lillian says. Except the memory of his wedding is in a church, then he goes home and looks at photos of his outdoor wedding, and now two plus two equals… not four.
His hallucination-dream-memories are full of people who say nothing and whose faces are blurred. That’s just a thing called prosopagnosia, Lillian says. Neat! One of those people is a man bent and folded in all manner of unnatural ways, scuttling around like a crab and making those crackly-bone sounds you hear in horror movies, you know, the sound of your rotisserie bird being crunched under the wheel of your Celica. Lillian keeps pushing him to go deeper and deeper, and not to let Mr. Cracklybones intimidate him. There are rules, of course. She tells him not to go out the door of the room he finds himself in when he’s in there, but doesn’t say anything about not getting wet or eating after midnight. Should he trust her? Of course he should — she’s Phylicia Rashad, not some mad scientist, right? NOOOOOOOO SPOILERRRRRRRRRRRRRRS!
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Get Out and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are references, and my hope that Nolan would bump into Bing Bong somewhere in his subconscious went unfulfilled.
Performance Worth Watching: Athie gives a fine central performance here, although as his character gets more complex, the movie itself only gets dumber.
Memorable Dialogue: Decontextualized for greater comedic impact: “I died. And now I’m here.”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: Enough of the bone crackin’ fever, horror movies. Enough already, sound designers. So many crackity crackity bones. It’s like someone fell into a “But that’s not the shark-jumping!” moment in Black Box. No, that happens when we suss out the twist three or four story beats before it happens, which is early in the game, allowing us to realize there’s another twist coming down the pipe. You’ll probably see that one coming, too. The plot just doesn’t hold its H2O long enough.
Granted, movies needn’t outsmart us to be entertaining. But this one emphasizes its twist, short-shrifting us on theme, character and dramatic oomph. It begins as a compelling mystery rooted in a man’s trauma, and ties in a statement about domestic violence, then pushes aside any substantial content as it deteriorates into high-concept hogwash. It’s not about anything but its own vaguely clever twists, and devolves into a blend of poker-faced horror and preposterous, overwrought Tyler Perryisms. You’ll giggle a little as this riff on the sunken place sinks into silliness.
Our Call: SKIP IT. Black Box is like a cardboard box in the rain — starts off sturdy but slowly falls apart.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.
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The following is article is from a "case report was published in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience". where patient brain waves were recorded in their final moments. In the article, the patient was unknowingly dying, most of the brain had stopped after the heart had stopped, the section of the brain still showing activity was the memory retrieval points.
Reflecting where people have stated they had seen their lives flash in front of them during a near-death experience.
The Brain Waves of a Dying Person Have Been Recorded in Detail For The First Time
24 FEBRUARY 2022
People who have looked their mortality in the face often describe their near-death experiences in surprisingly similar terms – vivid recollection of memories, a sense of standing outside of their body, bright lights, or a feeling of tranquility.
While there is plenty of anecdotal evidence from people who have had near-death experiences (NDEs), scientists have little to no data on what happens in the brain as people transition into death. However, under tragic circumstances, scientists have collected the first continuous data on the neural dynamics of the brain during death.
When an 87-year-old patient developed seizures after receiving surgery due to a fall, doctors used electroencephalography (EEG) to monitor his condition; unfortunately, the patient deteriorated and sadly passed away while these recordings were taking place.
Due to the do-not-resuscitate status of the patient, and with the family's consent, the unexpected event allowed scientists to record the electrical activity of a dying human brain. While simplified EEG recordings have been captured from patients withdrawn from life support before, the full placement of recording equipment in this case made for an unprecedented level of detail.
"We measured 900 seconds of brain activity around the time of death and set a specific focus to investigate what happened in the 30 seconds before and after the heart stopped beating," says Ajmal Zemmar, a neurosurgeon at the University of Louisville, US.
"Just before and after the heart stopped working, we saw changes in a specific band of neural oscillations, so-called gamma oscillations, but also in others such as delta, theta, alpha and beta oscillations."
Neural oscillations are the collective electrical activity of neurons firing in the brain, and are more commonly known as brain waves. These waves of electrical activity happen at different frequencies, and various frequency bands have been linked to different conscious states.
Thus, neuroscientists have managed to associate different frequencies of brain waves with specific functions like information processing, perception, consciousness and memory during wakefulness, and states of dreaming and meditation.
Just after the patient suffered the cardiac arrest that led to his death, his brain activity revealed a relative spike in gamma band power that was interacting the most with alpha waves – a pattern not dissimilar to memory recall.
"Given that cross-coupling between alpha and gamma activity is involved in cognitive processes and memory recall in healthy subjects, it is intriguing to speculate that such activity could support a last 'recall of life' that may take place in the near-death state," the team writes.
The authors do note several caveats. Firstly, the patient's brain was in a post-traumatic state that had suffered from bleeding, swelling, and seizures. Additionally, the patient had received large doses of anti-seizure drugs, which might also affect neural oscillatory behavior.
There were also no baseline, 'normal' brain scans of this patient to compare the brain activity to. However, by definition we can't have access to such data in healthy patients whose deaths are impossible to anticipate. Therefore, obtaining recordings of the near-death phase could only come from an already ill patient.
Despite these limitations, the team's findings do point to a potential link between brain waves observed during death with the phenomenological experiences of NDEs, where participants describe their life flashing before their eyes.
What we know about brain waves during memory retrieval points to evidence that the brain may go through a stereotyped activity pattern during death. The authors also note the findings are similar to alterations in neuronal activity that have been observed in rodents during death.
Fascinatingly, the results are consistent with the notion that the brain organizes and executes a biological response to death that may be conserved across species with tied evolutionary lineage and broadly similar neuronal structures.
Although researching what happens to the brain during death can be difficult, especially when patients leave behind distraught family members, Zemmar takes some comfort in the idea that our brains may immerse us in our most beloved memories while we leave the world.
"Something we may learn from this research is: although our loved ones have their eyes closed and are ready to leave us to rest, their brains may be replaying some of the nicest moments they experienced in their lives."
The case report was published in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience
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