Rating: 2.5/5
After a suicide attempt, Kathleen Quinlan, playing 16-year-old Deborah, is admitted to an institution. Straight away, we experience the whispers that are in her head — “traitor”, “secrets” — and a person in stereotypical tribal clothing and face paint that does not appear to be real
More and more, fantasy intersects with reality, in which tribe-like gods rule and who forces her to hurt herself as penance
Her time in the institution is populated with the theater kid version of insanity, where everyone performs song and dance, disassociating or instigating fights. I can’t speak to the realism; it’s just cliche, especially post-One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
The real heart of the movie is in the individual therapy sessions with Bibi Andersson, where Deborah expresses her private language and learns, little by little, how to trust someone other than herself and how to experience genuine human pain
The passage of time in the movie is horrifying, where a couple of days feel like they have passed, and those lead to years lost. Still, as a viewer, it’s hard not to feel like the ending is sudden and maybe even unearned
Overall, not a stellar movie, but it found moments of warmth that helped it through
Stray Thoughts
- Dennis Quaid and Clint Howard show up in the movie’s last five minutes? It’s not a spoiler, they’re just playing baseball
- Nice homage to Christina’s World, but a tad on the nose, yeah?