Topher Tracking Issue 08: Delirium

Feat. a totally normal human female character

Do you ever watch a horror movie and realize the main character is incredibly stupid? They are given every sign that this house or person is dangerous, and yet they stay, they investigate the spooky sounds, they run UP the stairs. And at a certain point, you start to think maybe this dummy deserves what’s coming to them?

I felt like one of those fools while queuing up Delirium (2018).

The first red flag was that this is a 2018 film starring Topher Grace that I, a movie/Topher buff, never heard of. Almost like it never existed.

The second red flag came when I pulled the rental up, and saw the movie had a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes. Now look, while Rotten Tomatoes (like MoviePass) will always have a place in my heart, I don’t usually give it much weight. I think its binary fresh or rotten grading system is unfair to movies. However, maybe seeing the 0% should have made me move out of the metaphorical house.

The third red flag was the revelation that there are actually TWO movies from 2018 called Delirium, both fully rotten on Rotten Tomatoes.¹ And yet, like a dum-dum horror movie final girl, I pushed on.

We open on the Blumhouse logo. Let’s gooooooooooooo!

Then there’s some spooky wavy home video footage of two boys playing.

“Every Sunday, my father had the camera out. He loved to tape us,” Topher intones. Wait, this dad was a home video obsessive, but he never bothered to get his camera fixed? No offense, but his footage looks like shit.

Cut to Topher, who plays Tom, talking to his therapist, Discount Jeff Bridges. DJB decides this as the perfect moment to run through Tom’s entire biography, which is pretty showoffy for a therapist, TBH. We learn Topher is a rich boy whose mother left the family when he was a child. His father was a prominent politician who killed himself just a few days prior.

Then DJB is like, “anyway, today’s the day we’re releasing you from the psychiatric facility! Don’t let the door hit you on the way out!” They march Topher (who is looking very gaunt and pale and sleepy in a hot way), out of the facility, which apparently features distant screaming and spooky figures staring through frosted glass 24/7.

He gets driven home by Patricia Clarkson, who deserves better than this. She plays a cop tasked with making sure Topher remains at home (oh I forgot to mention, Topher is under house arrest alone in his father’s huge-ass mansion, and has to wear an ankle monitor).

The movie instantly wants us to know this lady cop is bad news. She tells Topher his father was eaten by his own dogs, and threatens to throw him back in the psychiatric facility, which is pretty rude. This is such a big, mustache twirling performance from Patricia, and I can’t really put my finger on why I’m not having as much fun as she is.

We get a montage of Topher wandering around the house. He swims in the fancy under-the-floor pool, watches home movies, settles into his old (windowless) room, and hallucinates a bunch of spooky things (OR DOES HE???)² This is around the time I realized that Topher is in literally every frame of this movie, and instantly regretted waiting until the last minute to watch Delirium.

Topher orders groceries, and an absolute smokeshow arrives to deliver his Fruity Pebbles (if I had a dollar for every time a super hot babe delivered MY groceries, amiright?) She introduces herself as Lynn and is immediately attracted to Topher. And….that’s really all there is to Lynn.

Guys, I can’t express to you how much I hate this Manic Pixie Hot Topic Wet Dream of a character.

She is at her job, but for some reason can’t resist this squirrelly hermit man in a musty mansion who just ordered Fruity Pebbles! She marches INTO his house, and that’s when I knew this movie was written by a man. In no world would a woman willingly enter the home of a stranger with an ankle monitor.

Lynn immediately is super invested in Topher’s whole situation. When he wonders why she’s asking him so much about his life, she purrs “because you’re weird and interesting.” LADY! YOU. ARE. AN. ADULT.

To calm down, I reminded myself that Topher’s character frequently hallucinates people and things that aren’t actually there, so Lynn must be a hallucination. But SPOILER ALERT nope she is real she is meant to be an authentic representation of a human woman in the year 2018. She gives him a mix tape, like all women did in 2018.

Topher sees more spooky things around the house, and finds a crawl space behind his father’s office with peepholes to spy around the house. This sequence honestly has no bearing on the rest of the plot but features some impressive flashlight holding by Topher Grace.

Topher gets freaked out and calls Patricia Clarkson to come check out the house.³ Patricia shows up and negs him some more for his psychotic disorder. Then she offers him a shot of whiskey and tries to kiss him EEWWWWWWW!

When Topher rebuffs her, she beats him up, threatens him, and takes away his pills.

TBH I’m conflicted about this story beat. I like that they incorporated the real-world horror of mentally ill people being targets of abuse by their caretakers, and I think it works as a way to increase the main character’s sense of isolation. BUT it is executed so poorly. It’s clunky and icky and I was not a fan and let’s move on.

With his medication gone, Topher’s hallucinations get worse. He starts chugging Nyquil to sleep at night. There’s a genuinely frightening scene where the under-the-floor pool starts closing while he’s still underwater. He finds another secret crawl space in his father’s bedroom featuring a 2-way mirror (hey, the guy liked peeping).

Then his brother, Alex, shows up. But waitaminute, Alex is supposed to be in prison! Alex is meant to be really tough and scary, but TBH he mostly reminded me of Skeet Ulrich as the gang leader on Riverdale.

“This is the skin of a killer, Bella.”

Lynn calls to see if Topher listened to the mix tape she gave him, because that’s something that makes sense for her to do. He asks her if she can steal some antipsychotic drugs from her job and she’s like, “totes! no prob! anything for you, guy I just met!”

Topher’s brother disappears, so Topher strips naked and swims in the pool.⁴ Obviously, this was my favorite scene of the movie. We even get a glimpse of Topher butt, prompting me to yell aloud, "That's a fresh tomato!"

Lynn shows up and Topher acts surprised even though he just told her to come over (?) She finds a drawing he made of her and is super turned on (what). “I always wanted a stalker,” she says. GET HELP, LYNN!

She refuses to give Topher the pills until he comes clean about what happened with his brother. Topher tells Lynn a story about how his brother murdered a teenage girl and tied him to a pole to force him to watch.

As he tells the story, Alex re-appears behind Lynn, and blesses us with the movie’s first unintentionally funny moment, Topher recalls Alex telling him “sometimes it takes two men to make one brother,” And Alex mouths the words along with him. This made me snort-laugh.

Lynn leaves and the bothers find a video suicide note from their father (Discount Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate). They squabble for a bit about money that may be hidden in the house, before Patricia Clarkson shows back up and tells him she’ll bring back his meds. Then he passes out. TBH this all could have been cut.

Lynn shows back up (girl, get some hobbies!) to tell Topher about all her trauma. Then they make out and he asks her out on a date. But UH OH Alex returns and attacks Lynn! Topher scoops her up to save her just as Patricia Clarkson returns.

Of course, Patricia assumes Topher hurt Lynn. When he tries to tell her it was his brother Alex, PC delivers the second best unintentional laugh line of the film: “YoUr BrOThEr DiEd iN a PrIsOn FIRE!”

A lot of hard-to-follow action happens after that. Patricia Clarkson dies, but the editing is honestly so bad I’m just going to skip ahead to the final big reveal: Topher and Alex’s mom never left, she’s been imprisoned in a bunker underneath the pool for decades!!! This is super creepy and a pretty good twist TBH. Unfortunately, Alex immediately kills her.⁵

Topher and Lynn leave the house holding hands, which makes me feel sad for Lynn. The police pull up, and we get this exchange:

Cop: “Is this your house?”

Topher: “It is now.”

Cue cool shades! Cue The Who’s Won’t Get Fooled Again (Remix)! Cue the CSI: Miami title card!

The end! Or… is it?

That’s right, Delirium’s final twist comes as the credits roll and it’s revealed the movie was produced by none other than….

Leonardo Dicaprio???

(???)

I guess the best movies really do leave you asking more questions than they answered.

This movie is better than Rotten Tomatoes gives it credit for. It has an interesting premise and a truly surprising twist and Topher butt. Unfortunately, I still wouldn’t call it “good.” The pacing was too slow and the action scenes were too confusing. Plus I hated literally all the female characters.

I’ll leave you with this Certified Fresh screenshot of Topher getting ready to skinny dip:

Happy Halloween, pervs!

1. Do I hate myself enough to watch the other one for comparison’s sake?

2. He even hallucinates his father’s aggressive dog, who, according to the IMDb trivia, was also in Hotel for Dogs. What range.

3. Is DJB at his timeshare in Siesta Key?

4. They got their money’s worth with that pool!

5. She later comes back to life to drown him tho. Girl power!