I think this movie got such a low overall rating because most people didn't understand it or appreciate it, perhaps it didn't strike so close to home as it did for me. The telepathic man who is either channeling his evil, crazy dead mother or creating her ghost through his own powers was the most haunting and chilling since Norman Bates in Psycho. The scenes in the mental hospital were incredibly accurate, having worked in one myself. The female doctor trying to help the telepath was very touching, and although I thought that the other doctors and cops would turn out to be two-dimensional villains I was pleasantly surprised when they turned out to be normal human beings with faults and compassion in the end. The times that the telepath projected his horrors onto others in self-defense was difficult viewing, disturbing yet necessary and very important. The scenes with lobotomy and ECT should remind all of us of the very real non-fiction horrors buried in American medical history, experts so sure of themselves that they self-justify doing terrible things to peoples' brains. I won't give away the ending but it was very ambigious and shocking.
Review of The Sender
