A medical student named Adam (Christian Oliver) gets an email from a doctor who promises him that, should he decide to meet him at his remote cabin at the top of a mountain, he'll show him the medical practices he's been working on for so long and cut him in on the deal. Seeing as Adam has just failed his final on ethics in medicine, it shouldn't surprise anyone to find out that he's up there as soon as he can manage, keen to learn about the kind of medical experiments that they don't teach you in school.

A pretty young woman named Kate (Courtney Mace) meets him at the requested location and drives him up the mountain as far as she can before she hands him a pair of cross-country skis and makes him go it alone, following the red ribbons that have been tied to the trees that dot the landscape in order to mark the trail. Though it takes him a while, he finally finds the cabin as promised and he's greeted by Doctor Vick (Dean Stapleton), who is much younger looking than you'd expect a doctor with such an advanced mind to be.

What Adam learns next he finds out the hard way – he's been set up! He has the life choked out of him and is subsequently frozen. Doctor Vick, on the other hand, delivers on his promise to show him his medical advancements when he brings Adam back to life. The problem with this, however, is that Vick has far from perfected his technique and any time things do go one hundred percent as planned, he has to start everything over again going all the way back to square one which means killing poor Adam again – something that he is initially understandably upset with but which he soon comes to understand.

More of a head trip than a straight out horror film, Subject Two is a thought provoking movie that makes you question the price of proposed immortality. Everyone wants to live forever at some point in their live and most of us are afraid of dying. As Adam is experimented on time and time again he loses all of his feelings, emotional and physical, except for the anger that he twitches with over the fact that he keeps getting killed – so with that in mind, he is feeling something, even if he isn't really aware of it initially. Is the sacrifice worth it? What good is eternal life if Adam is unable to enjoy, to feel, and to take in that what makes life worth living in the first place?

Don't go into Subject Two expecting scenes of gory operating room procedures or mad scientists antics, as it's much quieter than that and it isn't going for shock value. Instead, Writer-director Philip Chidel has crafted a tense and deliberately paced film that plays it smart instead of choosing to bombard us with traditionally horrific imagery.

Set almost entirely inside the cabin and to a lesser extent outside the cabin in the snowy area around it, the movie switches back and forth between very open in terms of the visuals to having some rather claustrophobic bits which makes for an interesting contrast. The pacing could have been tightened up a little bit and the movie does drag in spots, particularly in the middle of the film, but those who don't mind the slow burn and can look past a couple of the low budget hurdles (the gun shot sound effects sound fake, for one) should find an enjoyable movie that's worth a look.

Video:

The 1.78.1 anamorphic widescreen transfer is sharp and colorful with more detail present in the image than you might expect from a low budget DV production. From the opening scene that takes place on a snow covered mountain top to the later, darker scenes that occur inside the cabin, the image remains quite strong. There are no problems to report with mpeg compression artifacts and while there is some moderate aliasing to look for here and there, it's not overpowering nor is it omnipresent. Black levels stay pretty deep and there's no color bleeding.