If you woke up in the hospital after a car
accident put you in a coma, only to discover the hospital is staffed by terrifying,
faceless demons: what would you do?
Sam is a Tech Entrepreneur with a loving and
supporting wife, currently pregnant with their first-born child. His workaholic habits cause
him to wind up on the receiving end of a drunk driver’s pick-up truck. However, what awaits him
in the hospital is far worse of a nightmare.
I’m going to break down the mistakes
made, what you should do, and how to beat the faceless hospital staff in Disquiet.
We start out following Sam, a loving father and husband who gets himself into a nasty car crash.
We’re not given much info yet at this point, but we can see from how he’s being carried into
the hospital, he probably suffered some pretty serious injuries, as well as a concussion.
He’s probably going to need some serious medical attention, but judging by how he’s still
pretty much all there and conscious, I’d say his odds are about fifty-fifty. We cut
to black as Sam is wheeled into the OR.
Sam wakes up in the hospital from a
coma. He pulls out his breathing tube, which I’d generally say is a terrible idea,
and is immediately treated to some 28 Days Later sh*t, with a seemingly empty hospital.
He’s clearly suffered a head injury.
Before he can even think of his next move,
the old patient next to him suddenly attacks him and tries to choke him out. Nice.
Welcome back to the land of the living: here’s budget-Saruman in a violent, demented
fit of rage as your welcome-gift. Seriously, either they knowingly left an old geezer with
violent tendencies next to your comatose body the entire time, or something’s off here.
He manages to push him off just before it looks like he’ll be going night-night from the choking,
and gives him the hospital-sanitized equivalent of the toilet lid tank to the cranial.
That’s what you get Saruman, now go back to Isengard.
Sam screams for help in the hallway, and somehow there’s like… zero medical staff
around, nor anyone responding to what is a SUPER LOUD altercation between two patients in
what I suppose is the ICU, meaning there should certainly be people around.
Saruman ambushes Sam like a hunter from left 4 dead
After pinning him down, and Sam miraculously not needing a teammate
to get the hunter off he fights him off using everything near him, as you should.
But Saruman’s been here a while, and he’s gotten lonely - so he’s not taking no for an answer.
Sam IS going to be his prison-wife, like it or not.
At the last second, just before his backdoor suffers horrendous damage, he manages to
stick Saruman with the scalpel left conveniently in front of him and immediately finishes his
kill, because Sam here watched a sh*t ton of Nerd Explains and knows that by now he would
have received help if any was available.
Seriously though, wouldn’t it be SO awkward if a
whole security team and nurses show up just NOW? After you brutally f*cking shanked this guy to
death with a scalpel? Oh well, at least there’s cameras so you can argue it was self defense.
Maybe minus the part where you repeatedly scream “DIE DIE” though, just a thought.
He screams for help and it definitely gives off a weird vibe. I’ve been in hospitals at
pretty much every possible time of the day, and I can guarantee you they would never,
not ONCE, leave you alone like this.
But if you really want to be sure, now’s
when you haul a*s back to your hospital bed, and use the big button to page the nurses.
If THEN nobody shows up, yeah.. Well.. that’s probably where I’d be getting
my 28 Days Later on, too.
There’s no signs of struggle in the hospital,
nothing that really suggests anything could be THIS wrong, but that shouldn’t be the
biggest sign of comfort either. What if something awful did happen, but the majority of
people managed to evacuate? Sam could have just been left due to the fact he was in a coma,
a la Rick Grimes, for all we know.
Where is the corpse though? Maybe my
memory’s off, but I’m pretty sure you left a perfectly good and dead wizard laying
right there in the corridor. Even weirder, the scalpel and other medical instruments are
back where they previously were, but there IS a pool of blood on the floor.
He walks past another hospital room and sees the old man there, seemingly still in
a coma with his throat UN-SLASHED.
Yeah excuse me nurse, do you happen to know where
MY old wizard guy is? Yeah, it looks kinda like the one you got here, except mine has several
deep stab wounds in it. Thank you.
He checks his phone, and of course
there’s no service. I don’t know, at this point I’d feel confused as sh*t.
Maybe the head injury is making us see sh*t, but then why would we be covered in blood?
Also the old man has been re-intubated?
There’s no way, even if he survived,
that he did that all to himself.
There’s definitely some f*ckery afoot.
He keeps his eyes on Saruman the whole time while he gets changed - sh*t dude, I would too.
It's too early to call supernatural evil, but this would definitely feel like a setup.
He finally runs into some actual assistance and great… It's one single, lone nurse. I
sure as f*ck hope you guys don’t ever get medical emergencies in this ICU, seems
you’re a tad understaffed.
Okay.. f*ck this. Either we’re seriously
losing it, or something’s up.
See, the problem I'd have in this
situation is that I’d trust my own instincts far too hard, which makes
sense considering what I do for work.
This would either save me if I’m right, or
end really, really badly if I’m just slashing up people due to hallucinations caused by a
head-injury - but I’d take my chances here.
This would be far too vivid a
hallucination to “just happen”.
What about the blood on his gown? I’d show that to
nurse Betty here and ask her to explain that. It WAS initially still there when Saruman teleported
back to his bed, it only stands to reason it would still be there moments later.
Before he can realize the old man’s gone, the nurse is too.
Right about NOW, is when I would seriously start questioning if I’m losing
my grip on reality, or if we’re just about to be in some deep, deep sh*t.
“No f*cking way”, yup, that sounds about right.
He bolts down towards the elevator, trying to keep it together.
For f*cks sake man, don’t turn your back to exposed and empty hallway.
Take a couple of steps back in case Saruman’s in the elevator, but enough that
you can quickly jump in if he’s not.
Resting your head against it is just asking to
be grabbed by someone from the elevator, or to be attacked from behind - or both.
Like that… Saruman sprints towards him. As is usual, he makes it behind closed elevator doors
with seconds to spare. How lucky, and totally not unlikely to happen in real life.
He falls back-first into the elevator, which luckily for him, wasn’t used to ambush him.
Except it stops… Oh no.
One of the ceiling-panes above him gets
knocked loose revealing Saruman is STILL on his tail. Did we agree to date him and then
ghost him due to the coma or something?
Sam does the wise thing and grabs a
suitable weapon from nearby, but luckily, Saruman leaves him alone… for now.
We cut back to the accident and Sam’s looking rough.
From the first responders, we understand the other driver has died in the
crash, and that he was intoxicated. We haven’t been given much to go off, but it is possible our
protagonist is an awful person that’s done awful things, causing someone to be out for his life.
There definitely seems to be some symbolic implication with two first-responders
talking to him from two different windows:one a cop, one a paramedic.
Now, everything we’ve experienced so far is straight up movie-level sh*t.
Let’s be real: in real life, the character has seen so many movies throughout his life,
maybe even some Nerd explains, and he’s WELL aware something is off and it currently looks
like something supernatural is messing with him. Especially, judging by how Saruman was f*cking
clawing his way into the elevator, from the shaft, with seemingly superhuman strength.
We cut to our second protagonist, Monica, getting ready for some.. Uhm.. cosmetic
surgery, saying “anything to look beautiful.” and something tells me, if this is the same
hospital, you’re in for a bad f*cking time.
See, Monica is all about altering her
appearance in any way she wants.
She proudly tells her surgeon there’s only one
thing left after she gets her chest done.
The surgeon creepily says “Oh I’ma make you
more beautiful” like that isn’t the weirdest thing ever to say, in that tone especially, to
someone who you’re about to put to sleep. As we’ll find out later though, this guy has a lot
of .. notches on his belt, is all I’ll say.
They put her to sleep for the procedure,
as is normal, except… she suddenly sees that the medical staff that was treating her
just moments ago are now faceless monsters, moments before she loses consciousness.
She wakes up, with nothing really having changed around her, the medical staff all
vanished similar to Sam’s case. She removes the mask they used to put her to sleep, before
sh*t goes from 0 to 60 real fast.
Before she can think about anything,
she’s suddenly grabbed and held down on all sides by what appears to be..
Horrifically scarred cosmetic surgery patients, only something’s really, really wrong with
them. They kind of look like Zombies.
Sam hears her screaming down the hallway and
decides to hop back up from PTSD-land to help her. As he strolls in and tells everyone to
reach for the sky, the patients who were about to play a game of real-life surgeon with Monica
don’t seem all that impressed.
Bimbo number one calls his bluff and pretty much
makes him her b*tch instantly with the scalpel, only to immediately stop giving a d*mn about
protecting her face half a millisecond later.
Yeah dude, we saw how seriously
they took your first threat.
Let’s face it: you’re clearly not
that guy, and they know it.
Monica tries to hide in a corner, lending
some credibility to the myths around botox leaking into your brain, before Sam
tells her to run. Can’t say I disagree.
Theoretically, the play here is just to break
contact as fast as possible, run to a better, more easily fortifiable room and barricade it
for now, at least to get our bearings straight, swap stories of how we both ended up here, and
try to work out where to go from there.
Sure the first bimbo went down easily,
but something should be telling you by now that it’s likely something similar to your
very own Saruman experience, and that they will just keep coming no matter what you do.
A barricade may therefore also not do sh*t, but it’s worth a try at least and sure as hell beats
fighting yourself to exhaustion repeatedly versus adversaries that clearly don’t back down.
Sam seems to have some kind of telepathic connection with me, as this is exactly what
they do, after some obligatory sh*ttalk, even barricading the door to the room they were just in
to slow their attackers. This guy is definitely a Nerd Explains Subscriber. 10/10.
Except… he then stares at them through the barricaded door and immediately makes
me question his intelligence again. Run, you f*cking idiot.
Sam rightly calls out that Monica is the first real person he’s seen.
Now we know that, but he would still be totally right if he felt skeptical.
After all, there’s some mind-f*ckery at play here, but given that she was also
a victim, I do think she is in fact, another person trapped in here just like Sam.
They try to talk for a second and figure out what’s actually going on. Now, in general
I agree with doing this, but like I said, Sam: you KNOW these things are going to keep
coming. I’d have this discussion while making our way to the nearest emergency exit, or one of
those floorplans explaining where you are in the Hospital, to see if there’s a way out of here.
They figure out they both went into surgery of some kind and were put to sleep, before
awakening here, so what could it be?
I’m guessing, assuming we’re Sam, we’re
aware of common horror movie themes.
I’m therefore going with one of three options:
-Some SAW-type sh*t wherein someone ,with an axe to grind with us, wants us dead
-Someone has kidnapped us for some kind of experiment - Human or the Alien variety.
-We’re in some kind of hospital hell-purgatory level and we’re already Dead.
Sam tells Monica that they’re not exactly alone, basically explaining that it’s them against
well.. Something very, very OP. Monica wants to get to the elevator, and Sam gets a “little
too” aggressive in pointing out it’s a bad idea because Saruman will attack them.
Here’s a crazy idea: if you’re already stopping to talk all this sh*t out, maybe just
tell her exactly the details of your altercation, including that Saruman resurrected from the dead,
teleported, AND that he had The Mountain’s muscle, and that he was literally ripping off ceiling
panels with his bare hands in the elevator? I know it’s likely going to freak her the f*ck out,
but what do you stand to gain by not laying bare the full scope of what we’re up against?
If you don’t give her ALL the info, she’s useless to you because she’s underprepared for
Saruman reviving if you have to fight him again, which is HIGHLY likely my dude.
Giving her nothing more than “trust me bro, we gotta keep moving” they
agree to GTFO some other way.
Presuming that this hospital functions like
any other, I’d suggest the Security office.
Not only is there some chance of finding useful
items there, maybe even some non-lethal weaponry, but there should likely be plans and
information about the facility there.
Maybe even some way to contact
the outside world.
In any case, finding something to arm up
with should be a PRIORITY at this point.
The one thing that’s certain more than anything
else right now, that you can be d*mn sure about, is that you’re going to be fighting Saruman
and the Bimbos at least one more time.
The fact that you’re strolling through the hallway
without any problem means you’ve kept them at bay successfully for a moment, something which
you WILL regret not appreciating more.
Use that time to grab literally anything,
even if it’s just a f*ckload of scalpels to use as throwing knives and/or shanks from the
Nurses’ station. Literally anything. Ideally, you’d be able to manufacture some ranged weapons
from some of the scalpels, as range = safety.
They check the phones and
of course those are dead, but they do immediately check the floorplan to
figure out the best way out of this mess.
Now THAT is an accurately written character right
there, and pretty much exactly where my mind would be now, too. However, Sam points out that
Saruman basically teleported, came back to life, hooked himself up/off machines, basically
telling her about his superpowers like I initially suggested. Knowing the threat at hand
is SO underrated, so better late than never.
When we see the floorplan we notice that there’s
9 floors. Sam and Monica are currently on the 7th floor, with Roof Access being just 2 floors
above them. This presents us with a choice.
We can try going to the roof, since we are
relatively close, and see if we can flag anybody down. However, before that, to avoid wasting time
just in case, I would look out the windows.
I’m not sure what we’d see, but it’s likely
that it might at the very least clue us in.
At the very least, this would allow us to get
an accurate reading for the situation, based on what we can see around the Hospital. If it looks
like the parking lot of the mall in the Dawn of the Deadthen we know what’s up. If however there
are people walking around down there, we can ask them to call 911 and get us the f*ck out of here,
though I somewhat doubt that’ll be the case.
The alternative is making it down to the lobby and
trying to get out through the main entrance. With some luck, there will be other employees there
or maybe a Security Guard who can help us out, but again, we still have no clue what
we’re actually up against.
Monica basically tells Sam she’ll do anything with
him if he gets her out of this but our Chad here is loyal to his wife and kids.
It’s good to know she’s got the will to live though.
They hear another voice calling out, and Sam goes to “check it out”.
Monica actually tries to stop him. I’m loving this chick already, she clearly
knows that she’s in a horror movie and knows the horror movie cliches.
We meet our next character, Carter. He woke up handcuffed to his
hospital bed, saying he’d been shot and brought in before waking up like this.
So that is now THREE people that have gone into the hospital normally, gone under for Surgery, and
woken up in here. Considering it really feels (and sounds) like these people are “spawning” into the
hospital, I’m guessing this is some supernatural purgatory sh*t, where if we die in here, we die
in real life. That also implies if we “beat” whatever the task at hand is, we probably make it
back to the land of the living. I’d still need a little bit more convincing, but it does truly
sound like that’s what’s happening here.
Great, now all we need to do is
figure out what that task is.
From movies to folklore to religious texts,
one thing we know about spirits lingering is: they usually don’t understand or
cannot accept what’s happened to them, OR they have some kind of unfinished business.
It could be that Carter got shot for something he didn’t do, and doesn’t understand why he
died, that Sam went into a coma after his accident and died, and that Monica died due to
some complications with her cosmetic surgical procedure that was totally unexpected.
This implies we’re in some Sixth Sense Bruce Willis type sh*t, meaning we either
need to resolve each character’s unfinished business or make them realize
they’ve died to help them move on.
Monica doesn’t like the idea of teaming up,
thinking Carter’s a criminal. In general, if for whatever reason, someone is shot by the police
and brought to a hospital for medical treatment, cuffing them might just be a procedure
they follow. It could also be negligence, as the flashback does make it seem like
Carter got dropped by a cop for no reason.
Honestly, it doesn’t even matter. What’s
worse? A random guy who may or may not have robbed a grocery store, or freaking undead
supernatural bimbos and a coma patient who is literally invincible. I’d say the more people
we have in our team, the better, even if for the sole purpose of having more bodies to sacrifice to
make a quick getaway, should we get cornered.
I’m really glad they all armed up immediately
though, even if I personally think there should have been a bit more long-range/close-range
variety in their team, like I mentioned a moment ago. Going knife-fighting with scalpels,
versus undead opponents who cannot die seems like a lose-lose-lose situation all around.
At least something with a bit more range, or even a PEASANT SPEAR made from scalpels
and any nearby broom in a supply closet might be an infinitely better idea here.
Yeah, nah dude, something tells me PLENTY of killing is about to go down, it just might
not be you three DOING the killing.
And there you have it. For whatever reasons, even
though Sam stressed earlier that elevators are bad ideas, they’ve gone there anyway instead of taking
the stairs. Come to think of it, why is Sam making the decisions when he is literally the only one
of you three that has literal brain damage due to a head injury. No sh*t he’d guide you back to
the elevator in that case, he probably doesn’t remember telling Monica literally 2 minutes
ago why that’s a seriously stupid idea.
In stereotypical fashion, they try to
press the elevator button a million times, as if that’ll make it show up any faster,
just as the Bimbos do some weird a*s zombie crawl-running towards them.
They wisen up and decide to take the stairs, fully aware that until they figure out who
the main character is, they don’t know who the designated plot-armor recipient is.
They lock the door into the stairwell just in time, as Sam holds it, World War Z style and
tells the others to make a run downstairs.
I still think upstairs first is worth it,
it is significantly closer and you have no idea what to expect on any lower level.
At least from the roof-top level you’ll get a decent idea of what’s down there.
Sure, sure, you’ll have to fight through the bimbos once more, but now it’s 3 on 3. Besides,
if you take them on, near the roof-top entrance, you can bait them into a murder hole,
significantly improving your odds of at least seriously injuring/slowing them, long
enough to make a clean getaway downstairs.
Whatever, we’re going down first now, but not
before Sam again stares at the face of this woman, who clearly wants to rip his throat out,
instead of immediately running downstairs.
He’s not even reinforcing
the door - RUN YOU MORON.
I mean I get the lady is drop-dead gorgeous
and all, even for an undead assassin, but she’s NOT looking for a boyfriend
here - and like you said, you’re married. So do your wife a favor and LIVE.
As predicted, Sam falls behind the rest of his group and gets cut off, getting jumpscared
by a random demonic claw hand grabbing him, before HODOR appears out of nowhere and pins
him to a nearby wall by the throat. Because he saw a fire at the bottom of the stairwell,
he tells the orderly that there’s a fire and they need to get away, but he tells Sam that
Monica and Carter are NOT his friends.
After delivering this ominous line, Hodor’s
face morphs into another faceless demon, like the medical staff did for Monica, before he’s
pimp slapped to the floor by a mysterious doctor wielding a wrench, and Sam passes out.
We get treated to the full story about what happened to Sam. As it turns out he is
a workaholic entrepreneur who got hit by a drunk driver. However, he was also on
his phone at the time, texting & driving, which is dumb for obvious reasons as well.
The mysterious doctor and a strange character in a wheel-chair discuss Sam’s fate next to his
unconscious body, with the doctor wanting to “take Sam downstairs” because he’s a selfish workaholic,
which the man counters by saying he was hit by a drunk driver, which wasn’t his fault, and that
he should at least be allowed to decide.
Right, so I’m definitely calling number 3:
purgatory. Only it’s not that we’re already dead and need to right some wrongs, we need
to find our way out of this hospital to regain consciousness in the real world. I’m guessing
from this information it means that if we go downstairs and exit via the lobby, we will
“move on” and be dead for good instead.
I’m not quite sure why this also comes with
vicious attacks by demons though. Surely, if this is about understanding your sins,
atoning for them, and deciding (aka “fighting") whether you want to live or die, this would
be the main challenge in itself right?
What happens when a genuinely innocent person
appears there and these demons slash them to pieces? This just seems so random
all around, especially since they just help out Sam right here as well, where you’d
think with him unconscious it would be VERY easy to just finish him off right there.
Same wakes up, once again treated for his wounds. The mysterious doctor even threw in some Oxy for
his troubles. I’m not sure I’d take those though, Sam. I think the last thing you need right now
is to be h*gh off your a*s on painkillers, though I can definitely understand not wanting to face
this bullsh*t entirely sober either: it is still the way to maximize our odds here for sure.
As he gets dressed and mentally prepares himself for round two, he realizes the good Lord
above even left him a heavy a*s wrench for maximum DPS. +5 Holy damage on-hit.
He even pockets a secondary: good boy. I gotta say, I like these protagonists a lot more
than the usual kind we get to work with.
Sam is suddenly held at gunpoint and
drops his wrench. It’s the cop who we saw shooting Carter earlier, Frank,
asking him if he’s “one of them”.
This case is getting weirder and weirder, as this
also implies that somehow, this cop ended up in a life-threatening situation in the hospital. Sam
tells Frank there’s some kind of fire, but as Frank rightfully points out: this is the kind of
thing you’d know immediately if you looked out the window. We don’t get a good view of what Sam sees,
but it’s just pure darkness, is the point.
We cut back to Frank’s incident. We don’t really
get an idea of whether or not he got injured, similar to the other characters, but we do see
that Carter was in fact innocent, and our hero in Blue literally held the wrong people
at gunpoint while the cashier AND Carter pointed out it was the OTHER guy, an aisle
over, that was holding up the place.
Kudos for the cashier for
clueing Frank in, though.
Sam jumps to the conclusion it could be
terrorists, and that the hospital runs on generators, which would explain why the outside
is pitch black. Now, fine, I could understand that to some extent, but dude: you literally saw
demons with no face, undead bimbos with surgical scars ALL over them AND you heard a similar story
THREE times now that suggests you guys all had some sort of death-like experience.
At this point you’re just feeding the stereotype that spirits cannot accept their
death, because this definitely sounds like something supernatural to me.
Frank Houdini’s out of there, which immediately puts Sam on high alert: as it should.
He picks up his wrench and walks into the hallway, LOUDLY announcing his position, and even
completely turning his back on an empty hallway to pop more Oxy for his pain.
Your wife and kid NEED you to put your tech entrepreneur IQ to use here, Sam.
Sam hears the man from earlier, in the wheelchair, who introduces himself as Virgil. He tells Sam
he’s not going anywhere, and that he’s real.
Talking to Virgil for a minute, it’s more than
clear that he knows exactly what’s up here, as he’s not surprised by anything Sam tells him
and seems more than fine with holding his own. Not to mention, he tells Sam that the doctor
from earlier wanted to take him downstairs and that he “would not LET her” implying he
has an immense amount of power here.
The biggest missed opportunity in the movie, as
you’ll find out, is not asking Virgil as many questions as humanly possible here. I’m talking
in full toddler mode. “WHY, WHY, WHY, etc” til Virgil f*cking explodes. If he knows anything
about this place, I’d want to know it, too.
He clearly wants Sam to go up to the roof,
suggesting he may get cell reception there. I know I said earlier that this would make
sense, but if he sees nothing but pitchblack dark through the windows, and nobody’s getting
cell reception inside the building itself, I doubt that’s the reason Virgil wants us to go up.
