Tensions abound from the start as no two crew members necessarily like each other and the rushed job proves rather exhausting. Gordon reveals to Phil that there are problems at home and that he is basically living in his van because he recently lost his temper and hit his wife. Hank's enjoyment when talking about stealing Phil's girlfriend makes the tension even worse.
After a generator fails, Mike goes down to the basement to fix it and finds a box marked as evidence, which has audiotapes in it labeled sessions 1-9. As he begins to listen to them, he learns that they are the taped therapy sessions of a woman named Mary Hobbes with Multiple Personality Disorder (patient #444). She has three personalities. There's Princess, which is an innocent female childlike personality that lives in the tongue because she's always talking. Billy is a male personality that lives in the eyes because he sees everything and seems like a protector of sorts. There's also a personality named Simon that the other personalities seem to be afraid to talk about. Upon reading Mary's file, it appears that she was given a china doll for Xmas when she was young and her brother was given a brand new hunting knife. Her brother plays a joke on Mary by jumping out of the darkness and scaring her on Xmas night causing her to fall on her doll which breaks and cuts her up pretty badly, she has a mental breakdown and grabs her brother's new knife and murders her family with it. With each tape, we hear more from her different personalities concerning what happened that night, as the doctor continues to ask about the third personality named Simon which the others are still reluctant to talk about.
Mike continues to find reasons to stop working on the asbestos job and to keep going to the basement to listen to one session tape after another while Gordon seems to be losing his grip on reality due to the stress of the job. We also notice a few other strange things about Gordon. He has a terrible burn on his leg, he often talks to his wife Wendy on a cell phone that obviously has no battery, and there are times when we notice he has things in common with the multiple personality patient Mary. Such as when he's on the phone with no battery, Mary's tombstone #444 (all graves at the asylum have just numbers, no names) is shown broken underneath the tree that Gordon is sitting on while "talking to his wife". We also see him stop and take a poignant moment to look at the magazine clippings on the wall of a patient's cell, when he leaves, we notice the patient's cell number is 444.
Random suspicions arise among the crew, such as why Mike isn't around much, why Gordon has blood under his fingernails, why Phil is secretly meeting with some neighborhood punks, and Hank ends up disappearing altogether and needs to be replaced. A deep voice sometimes speaks to Gordon saying "welcome home" and we're left wondering what events are real and what events are not.
At the beginning of the film, a guard has to let the crew in and they ask why a guard is needed because it's not like patients are gonna be escaping. He tells the crew that it is more about keeping patients out since many of them return to the hospital after it closed because it was the only home they knew. The correlation between patient Mary Hobbes and Gordon slowly becomes clear when we learn that the burn on Gordon's leg was the result of a pot of boiling water that spills on him while trying to talk to his wife about the baby screaming. Turns out he didn't just hit her, he's actually murdered his wife and infant daughter. This was the breakdown that caused him to be sent to the asylum, just like Mary. Gordon had been a patient at the asylum when it closed down and was desperate to return to the only home he knew. We know this because he looks into another cell that has pictures of his family on the walls, letting us know that this was his cell while at the hospital.
As a beautiful overhead shot of the hospital slowly drifts by, we hear the voice of the doctor asking Simon where he lives. In an eerie deep voice, Simon finally replies, "I live in the weak and in the wounded, doc". Both Gordon and Mary were weak and wounded, causing them to both have mental breakdowns and be sent to the asylum. I suppose the personality of Simon could reside in each and every one of us. Suffering a terrible wound while in a weak state of mind is a possibility that could occur at any time, and who knows what consequences that may have?
A fascinating side note about this movie is that no sets were needed at all because it was filmed entirely at the abandoned Danvers State Lunatic Asylum. A hospital that was not only huge in size but strangely beautiful. Despite being on the registry of historic buildings it was demolished with the exception of the front facade and was turned into some very cheap and ugly apartments that people have nothing good to say about. Surprisingly, hauntings weren't among the many complaints.
