The horror sub-genre of the 'evil brain' (most famously known by 1953's Donovan's Brain and typified by images of brains floating in jars) is affectionately thought of by many older fans even though its never had a true classic to call its own. 

(Kind of like the 'killer hand' sub-genre - known best by The Beast With Five Fingers. Individual body parts apparently don't lend themselves to great films!)

And except for the occasional foray into cloning, mad scientists have been largely M.I.A. since the '80s when the eccentric likes of Herbert West, Dr. Logan and Seth Brundle updated the genre stereotype with wit and poignancy. So from a horror/sci-fi standpoint, the low budget chiller Magdalena's Brain is immediately notable for reviving these languishing genre staples while artfully avoiding the familiar.

Directed by Warren Amerman, who co-wrote the screenplay along with producer Marty Langford, Magdalena's Brain introduces us to two brilliant minds. There's Magdalena herself, a former surgeon (played by Amy Shelton-White) and her scientist husband, Arthur (played by Sanjiban Sellew). In an experiment gone wrong, Arthur has become a mute quadriplegic and the two spend years working on new A.I. technology to transfer Arthur's intellect into a new host.

This is a standard pulp sci-fi set-up, of course (even more so when the plan becomes to put Arthur's brain into the body of a nice but dim-witted hunk), but what makes Magdalena's Brain different is that the experiments of Magdalena and Arthur are not clearly doomed to failure. At first glance, the two seem far more apt to do good than their cinematic predecessors in the scientific field.

After a brief opening showing Magdalena's work as a surgeon (these scenes, by the way, are the film's weakest moments - stick with the film, though, as it improves as it goes on), we join Magdalena and Arthur after four years of pursuing their A.I. research as they work full-time out of a lab/living quarters reminiscent of Seth Brundle's pad in The Fly. Their lives hinge on making this one breakthrough discovery and the unfolding process is involving, thanks to unusually authentic-sounding dialogue. When you're making a film about a certain profession - whether it be golfers, gamblers, FBI profilers, or whatever - I believe you have to make it seem as though you're being accurate to how these people work and talk. And one of the main strengths of Magdalena's Brain is that the dialogue has the ring of truth to it.

I may not understand all the terminology being spoken but listening to it, I believe that it isn't just empty words. And the middle portion of Magdalena's Brain as Magdalena and Arthur let us eavesdrop on their work is ultimately the strongest section of the film due to that sense of the filmmakers trying to play 'above the room' as it were. This is trying to be a genre film with, well, a brain. And for a good part of its brief running time, I think it succeeds. It brings a deeper sense of reality, not just a glib portrayal, to its scientific scenario when many filmmakers would've felt it was permissible to wing it. Some viewers may find all the talk of "crystalline lattices" to be a bit dry but I liked the fact that the dialogue wasn't dumbed down and the actors - Shelton-White in particular - do a nice job of making even the most awkward jargon flow.

Mark Devin's photography here is striking as is the effectively moody score composed by director Amerman along with Thomson Kneeland and Nate Radley. This is not your typical low budget genre picture. It's striving for something deeper and smarter and it demands that viewers adjust their expectations accordingly. Anyone looking for an exploitation film will be sorely disappointed here. This is very much a genre picture inclined towards the art-house, not the grind house. When it does veer into more conventional horror territory towards the climax, the film in fact becomes much less interesting.

In both its strengths and flaws, I would compare Magdalena to 1980's Altered States. Both films bear a superficial link to '50s sci-fi (Magdalena with Donovan's Brain, Altered States with 1958's Monster on Campus) but both subvert and complicate the genre expectations of that earlier era. Both strive for scientific realism in their dialogue, both depict a love story between two brilliant people, both bring a modern grit to an often antiseptic genre, and both have a trippy edge (for all the beauty of Magdalena's cinematography, I think this would be a perfect film for the computerized rotoscoping seen in Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly).