A troubled man tries to get home for his mother’s funeral, but events conspire to delay his journey. The third feature film from Ari Aster (Hereditary) is a completely bonkers, surreal and bloated pitch-black absurdist comedy. Beau Is Afraid isn’t so much your typical horror film but rather more of a disturbing Kafkaesque nightmare full…
Words on Bathroom Walls is an important movie. This mainstream dramatic teen romance normalises schizophrenia. While it’s often disturbing, it has an authenticity about it. That has much to do with the balance in the script by Nick Naveda – based on a novel of the same name by Julia Walton – and the calibre…
These two documentaries opened on 31 October 2019 in limited release. Both are worth searching out. Happy Sad Man An empathetic look at a number of ordinary Australians struggling with mental health issues, Happy Sad Man is a beautifully composed and moving documentary. The focus is on five men aged from their 30s to 70s,…
Next to Normal begins with a familiar modern family scene; suburban mother Diana Goodman (Carly Skelton) waits up late for her son Gabe (Christopher Batkin) and attempts to comfort her academically-anxious daughter, Natalie (Hannah Kassulke). Soon husband Dan (Adam Bartlett) rises to help prepare the family for “Just Another Day”. Yet their lives are anything…
Depression and suicide are hardly topics to make light of. But humour proves to be a powerful weapon in building understanding of the challenges associated with mental health in Chemistry. This is one of a trilogy by American writer Jacob Marx Rice that he dubs his suicide comedies. It features a pair of bright twenty…
What is truth and what is fiction? At times it’s hard to tell when watching Pvt. Wars. It’s 1975 and three Vietnam vets have good reason to be housed in a mental institution. Their reality is a most unfortunate one. Perhaps there are moments of clarity among their delusions, but if so very few. The…
The excitement I felt while watching One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) – a pivotal movie in my formative years – came flooding back while watching Unsane. A smart young woman seeks help after a stalker has made her life miserable for two years. But she’s inadvertently admitted to a private psychiatric hospital. The…
Solid performances feature in desert, 6.29 pm, a world premiere comedy-drama about a dysfunctional family. Events revolve around a difficult 17-year-old gay girl, Xan (Eva Seymour) who doesn’t warm to interaction with other family members. About to graduate from high school, she’s perpetually sullen and angry. Her older brother, Jamie (Darcy Kent), who doesn’t live at home,…
Accurate diagnosis and appropriate treatment for mental illness should be a given, but as history shows, often that’s not the case. In Asylum, two involuntarily institutionalised patients are put through the wringer by an overly officious (read: downright brutish) doctor. One is a young man, Ben (Steven Oktaras), who believes he is dead. Most of all, he…
The Black Dog takes hold and there is no letting go. That wake-up call is at the heart of the world premiere production of Erasers, which tackles the broader issue of disconnection. The latter is manifest in many ways, the disengagement between males and females, parents and children, blacks and whites, the gay and the…
