Rob Schroeder’s Ultrasound opens with thirty-something Glen experiencing a car crash on his way back from a friend’s wedding. In the pouring rain and with no other option, he knocks on the door of married couple Art and Cindi in search of help. There’s a noticeable age gap between Art and Cindi, and a baffled Glen is quickly caught in the midst of a seemingly fragile marital home after Art suggests – in fact, encourages – Glen to go to bed with his wife whilst he sleeps on the sofa. The speed with which this overtly “soapy” dynamic is set up – as if it’s something straight out of a tacky romance or even porno – betrays an uncanny and uneasy atmosphere in its opening twenty minutes, leaving the viewer uncertain of everything seen on screen. Is the stilted (almost comedic) acting style deliberate, or is this simply bad writing? What of the disjointed ellipses in its editing, with time and chronology seemingly imprecise or uncertain? Such strangeness is only compounded by the presence of absurdist, almost dream-like images (a dining tray complete with coffee and leftover food in the pouring rain, an ominously lit kitchen setting that somehow feels artificial).
Following the film’s title card, rendered in 1980s tech-neon, we cut to an apparently unconnected vignette of a woman going about her day, a woman who from different angles and perspectives appears to be pregnant, a fact which she doesn’t appear to be aware of herself. This narrative rupture signals with some certainty that we are now in the realm of the Lynchian and surreal. In fact, the opening car crash combined with the film’s later shady backroom dealings of corrupt politicians who plaster plastic smiles across campaign posters and television ads clearly calls to mind Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, the aforementioned director’s most notable trips into fragmented and unreliable psyches.
Whilst Ultrasound doesn’t reach the heights of these films, it does keep us guessing, and with the connections between Glen, Art, Cindi, and a team of doctors and lab technicians apparently researching the effects of hypnosis on confused and perhaps unwilling patients gradually making themselves known, the film makes for an intriguing game of psychological cat and mouse.
Notes from the Multiplex 