Rating: 3.5/5
Hooptober 5.0 | 17/32 | Cronenberg
Dennis Cleg (Ralph Fiennes) exits a train. He reaches into his waistband and pulls out a sock full of papers. From it, he fetches a sheet of paper with an address. As he walks, he mumbles to himself. He stops to pick up things. Eventually, he arrives at a halfway house run by Mrs. Wilkinson (Lynn Redgrave).
Dennis looks over his new room — a twin bed, a folding table with a lamp, and a sink in the corner. He sees the small chimney. He catches his breath as he opens a window to the factory noises outside his window.
Late one night, he looks through a window and sees his childhood self playing string games while his mother (Miranda Richardson) cuts potatoes. His young self wanders down to the pub to find his father (Gabriel Byrne) talking to a prostitute named Yvonne (Miranda Richardson).
Soon, the walls between the outside world and his internal reality dissolve. The traumas of his childhood and the foundation of his illness replay and disintegrate.
Ralph Fiennes embodies this psychologically disturbed man and pulls us into his unrelenting experience. The film integrates with his hallucinations and disorganized thinking.
Nothing about the experience suggests sympathy on behalf of the filmmakers — only to create as accurately as possible the experience of a schizophrenic mind.
Perhaps the most sympathetic approach to the material is to avoid reducing it to inspiration porn.
Instead, observe how the mind organizes experiences into truth and highlight the unreliability of memory and experience, including events the person could not have witnessed.
Miranda Richardson does a tremendous job in the dual roles of the mother and Yvonne. They feel like two different people but similar enough that it feels uncanny.
Let me be clear: this story is disturbing — so disturbing that it can also read exploitative. But that’s a line that Cronenberg has always walked to varying degrees of success.