Neil Bardo (a name rife with Buddhist significance) was on the verge of patching things up with his estranged wife Elena and moving back in with her and their son Wiley. Then he went on a fateful inspection with his slimy boss, Garrison Vey. The local district wants to convert a weird abandoned lab into a school, but it needs a clean inspection report. Vey stands to make a lot of money in kickbacks if the sale goes through, so he needs Bardo to issue a rubber stamp.
However, the property is very strange. There is a bunch of bizarre equipment that they naturally fire up. It has a strange effect on Bardo, giving him disturbing visions of a Japanese military lab in wartime Manchuria and warps his sense of time. Bardo suspects Vey had similar experiences, but the corrupt dirtbag denies it. Unfortunately, Bardo continues having vivid hallucinations. As a result, he crashes his motorcycle, potentially blinding Wiley for life. Obviously, the “site” should not pass inspection, but Vey uses every point of leverage, including Wiley’s future.
It soon becomes clear Bardo’s visions originate in the notorious Unit 731, where the Imperial Japanese conducted truly horrific experiments on prisoners. Using such a notorious site of real-life horror in a science fiction film conceived for entertainment purposes is a risky proposition. There is an a priori question of taste, but there was clearly an effort to depict Unit 731 with due sensitivity. Like it or not, the notion that the Macguffin experiment might focus on the facility because there were no survivors, also makes a certain degree of grim logical sense.
Perlman’s underlying concept, essentially that quantum entanglement, generational trauma, and karma are all more or less the same thing, is rather intriguing—and he develops this idea well. However, there is an awful lot that gets glossed over during the climax and denouement. It also strains credibility that anyone would ever trust Vey, especially Bardo’s wife.
Nevertheless, Theo Rossi is spectacularly sleazy as Vey. Jake McLaughlin and Miki Ishikawa have nice chemistry as Neil Bardo and Naomi Uchida, a journalist helping him investigate the site, who also happens to be his college ex. Arielle Kebbel does what she can in the role of Elena Bardo, but Perlman saddles her character with conspicuously dubious judgement.
Indeed, Site is messy in many ways, but it is also intriguing and provocative. Indeed, that is sufficient to recommend Site to sophisticated science fiction consumers, when it opens today (8/8) in LA, at the Laemmle Glendale.