After hooking up with a random woman, a guy in a dead end job finds his life falling into a weird and menacing decline ...

Vivid tale of psychosis that flashes back and forth between the occult and the mundane. The pace and energy are right up there, helped by sophisticated editing and well judged music, as the upbeat opening descends into frantic flight. The lead performance is good, with that anxious little face delivering some real aggression.

As a straight look inside a mental breakdown, this is very good, and the confrontations with concerned outsiders brings home the ashamed escape from uncomfortable truths that addicts suffer. There's also a clever dig at self-help books, where the original life affirming recommendations are reversed in a survival guide to witchcraft.

The story does take it further than distorted realism, into gothic horror, with a distinct vibe of Lynch about the mysterious characters who circle the hero in his desperate paranoia. But these figures remain on the surface of his delusion and don't really stand for anything in his own life, and so it remains an old-fashioned story with no feedback from the mysterious other side. There is some corroboration of an alternate reality, but in the end it's a clumsy balance. For a more skillful walk along that separating line in madness, check out Unsane by Steven Soderbergh from the same year.

Overall: Well produced terminal journey into madness.

For some reason the reviews on here are trending negative. This is a paranoia-fuelled nerd ride to hell as the main character is in a dead end job bored to death with his best friend telling him he needs to get laid. One night he gets high and the TV tells him to phone a number to meet some mystery girl. He does. Chaos ensues. Evil abounds. Bad ending for my dude. It's a solid movie. It doesn't try to be huge. It is what it is. I rate it fully. Peace.

In the bonus track of the DVD of "The Black String," the director and co-writer Brian Hanson described his film as "a suburban Gothic tale" and "a fun and mysterious film." While there was a strong dosage of the Gothic element inherent in the horror genre, the "fun" and "mysterious" parts were severely lacking.

Another problem with the film was the overall unpleasantness of virtually all of the characters. While Frankie Muniz was an effective Everyman character in his interpretation of the protagonist Jonathan Marsh, the rest of the cast seemed sketchy and underdeveloped. This was especially the case with Dena, who had one dynamic scene early the film, then essentially dropped out of the action.

The main dramatic element of the film was the "man on the run" trope with Jonathan racing against the clock to defeat the forces of darkness that have invaded his body through witchcraft. After he meets the character of Ms. Melinda, he has a tiny handbook that provides him with an arsenal of tactics to fight back against the witchcraft through resisting passing over to "the other side." The expectation that the hero would mount a strong defense against the forces of evil. Instead, he spent all of his time fighting the forces of the rational world (doctors, parents, friends, and police) to prevent him in his quest to overcome his "infection."

There were far too many scenes that were utterly static with Jonathan running in place while forced to live with his parents; getting tied up in a bed in the pscyh ward of a hospital; or remaining in a "circle" in an abandoned shack. The stasis of this film was paralyzing to the viewer.

In the extras segment of the DVD, we learn that the film began as a college thesis project, then received the green-light as a low-budget feature. But the final product still felt like a flawed film school learning experience. And the main problem was the script that never brought out the filmmaker's goals of the mystery and the fun.