Cryo Review: Clever Ending Can’t Make Up For Paper-Thin Characters
Movies that withhold their premise from the audience play a dangerous game. Take The Matrix, the most interesting thing about which is the idea of the world being a simulated mind-prison, and compare it with The Sixth Sense, which has arguably the most famous twist in movie history. While hiding it initially, The Matrix divulges what it's actually about relatively early, giving its viewers plenty of time to enjoy it in all its glory. The Sixth Sense, meanwhile, holds its organizing principle back for as long as possible, leaving people to spend most of their time essentially watching a different movie. The twist's power is valuable only in retrospect or on rewatch, and the most important question then becomes: Is the movie still interesting without its most interesting thing? The magic of M. Night Shyamalan's enduring thriller is that the answer is a resounding yes. Cryo, however, is a different story. This low-budget sci-fi film is actually doing something quite clever, but by keeping it hidden until the final minutes, it leaves viewers with a character drama that just isn't compelling enough to merit revisiting, even after learning how all its pieces fit together.
The feature directorial debut of Barrett Burgin, Cryo opens with a relatively simple sci-fi setup: Five people wake from cryogenically induced sleep to find themselves in a bunker with no memory of who they are. The Engineer who built the cryo-pods, designated 001 (Curt Doussett), is the first to remember that they are all willing participants in an experiment, each chosen by the Inventor (Michael Flynn) to test the effects of the device. Their amnesia, Engineer says, will wear off. The real problem is that the Inventor, who was supposed to wake them, is
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