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  • Awesome Music: Carter Burwell (writer of soundtracks for films like Fargo, Raising Arizona, and No Country for Old Men) does it again. For your persual, the film's main theme.
  • Complete Monster: Dr. Jonas, once the head of MK Ultra, is a psychiatrist who tortures people mentally, having used horrific techniques to break innocent men and turn them into assassins, while other innocents become framed patsies with their lives destroyed. Jonas uses his agents to kill anyone he deems troublesome, including Jerry Fletcher, who balked at one assassination of a judge he befriended whereupon Jonas had the man killed anyways. attempting to torture Jerry and brainwash or kill him and all connected to him, Jonas has continued his actions long after his operation has been shut down only to satisfy his scientific curiosity.
  • Designated Hero: Jerry is an unlikable jerk who sacrifices another man's life to save his own, without the narrative remotely commenting on it. Alice isn't much better given she swaps the charts and feels not one ounce of guilt over the conspiracy murdering someone else.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: Conspiracy theories are a lot more mainstream and causing a lot more problems than they were when the film was created. In the age of Sandy Hook, PizzaGate, QAnon and other supposed conspiracies making headlines for the violent and hurtful acts of their proponents, it's a lot less easy to watch a film about a mentally ill conspiracy theorist being vindicated for his behavior.
  • Nausea Fuel: Good luck ever eating oatmeal again.
  • Narm Charm: Jerry's escape on the wheelchair after receiving the "brain gravy" is somewhere between intense and completely ridiculous.
  • Paranoia Fuel: Many of Jerry's conspiracy theories being right because he was part of a conpiracy himselfBlack Helicopters that can't be heard, the government tracking you because you purchased a specific book, brainwashed assassins that are all connected because their conditioning gives them compulsions so they can be pin-pointed.
  • So Okay, It's Average: It's not a bad film, but it's more-or-less forgettable.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The "one of my conspiracy theories turned out to be right" angle, played straighter, might have been fun.

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