Daniel Isn't Real (2019) - Movie Review

Elijah Wood may have a pretty solid career as an actor, but his pedigree as a producer is on a whole other level. With his production company SpectreVision, the man has shown a real taste and willingness to back some pretty bizarre shit over the last few years. From the school-set zom-com Cooties, to the acclaimed vampiric western A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, to the trash masterpiece The Greasy Strangler, to the Boomer-scorching acid trip of Mandy from last year; SpectreVision is getting dangerously close to Point Grey Pictures for studios close to my heart of hearts. And their latest to reach cinemas over here certainly fits in that wheelhouse of cracked-out brilliance, although in a different way that what has come before.

It’s the story of college student Luke, who as a child had an imaginary friend called Daniel. His mother convinced him to lock Daniel away in a dollhouse, but after a traumatic encounter with his mother as an adult, he decides to let Daniel out once again. If this sounds like someone remade Drop Dead Fred, you’re actually not that far off. There are notes of the power of childlike imagination at its core, and the scenes where Miles Robbins as Luke and Patrick ‘Son of Arnold’ Schwarzenegger as Daniel definitely register on the same wavelength. However, this isn’t a comedy. This isn’t a film where we’re supposed to be entertained by how zany everything is. This is more like the filmmakers noticed how psychologically messed-up Drop Dead Fred comes across and ran with it.

As far as depictions of trauma and mental illness, in this case being rather explicitly described as schizophrenia, this is fucking harrowing. Between Luke and Mary Stuart Masterson as his mother, the film’s depiction of that level of dissociation from reality is quite confronting, made even greater through Patrick’s contributions to the production. He definitely has a Tyler Durden vibe to him, which is likely intentional given his place within the story, but he gives a far more immediately-sinister depiction of the alter-ego. Emphasis on ego.

The production values here are fucking incredible, to the point where I find myself questioning just how small this film’s budget actually is. The visuals courtesy of writer/director Adam Egypt Mortimer and cinematographer Lyle Vincent are genuinely insane in just how imaginative they can get, employing a lot of dream-like imagery and emphasis on symbols to create an indie drama that repeatedly gets invaded by something out of Panos Cosmatos’ nightmares.

It’s quite psychedelic in the literal sense, as it really gives the sensation that we’re staring at the contents of Luke’s subconscious, from the hellish vortex that the film opens with to the increasingly surreal locales that he and Daniel find themselves in. The soundtrack by Warp Records signee Chris Clark adds a lot to that sensation too. His use of electronic textures start out ostensibly normal, but it grows more and more fractured along with Luke’s own grip on reality, and when put next to Brett W. Bachman’s montage work later on, it’s honestly among the scariest things I’ve seen all year.

But more so than anything to do with the strictest mental health definitions, the thing that stands out the most here is something a bit more abstract. Okay, a lot more abstract, as it gets into Daniel’s place as not just the darker aspect of Luke’s mind, but also his shadow. Specifically, the shadow as defined by Carl Jung, consisting of everything which is present in an individual’s unconscious being. Anything suppressed, anything traumatised until it sinks under the surface, anything that you yourself don’t even know about yourself, is the shadow.

I may not fit the diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia myself, but looking at Luke’s moments of dissociation and personality alteration… have to admit, I know what that feels like. I was a very angry kid earlier in life, and because that side of my personality felt so unlike how I am any other time of the day, part of my brain compartmentalised it. I saw it as something different than myself, and in my mind, that’s what it became: The Beast that I keep locked in a cage in the back of my head. And every so often, when I find myself in the worst place mentally, it feels like I can hear him. Tempting me to let it all go and have him take the reins, just so I don’t have to deal with the world while my rage tore a path through it.

Yes, I actually named this abstraction ‘The Beast’; I guess there’s always been a part of me that’s embarrassingly edgelord.

Anyway, back on topic. Luke wrestles with his id made manifest in the form of Daniel, who keeps coaching him in social situations and even asks to take full bodily control of Luke at certain points (visualised with some of the best body horror of any film I’ve covered on this blog, no question). He seeks help from a therapist to calm things down, making for a pretty good balance in regards to treatment options for such things, and there’s a motif that their conversations keep coming back to: Meeting a delusion at its own level. It’s something that pops up a lot in mental health circles, the notion that simply being able to logic a person’s irrational thought processes away isn’t how any of that even works. You’ve likely seen it, or possibly even reiterated it, by telling someone with depression to just ‘get over it’. Would that it were so simple.

And as things continue to escalate, the imagery grows and grows, to the point where it crosses a genuine Cam threshold and turns the frame into a window overlooking Luke’s internal struggles. It gets really fucking intense, particularly in the third act where iterations of “Not like this! Not like this!” kept echoing in my mind while watching it, and even with the note it ends on, I still feel like I watched something that struck a major chord in my heart. Something deep under the surface, yet something I’ve been aware of for as long as I’ve carried awareness. In terms of psycho-horror, this is of the highest class, where the psychological aspect delves into real cerebral scar tissue, and the horror drags its jagged fingernails across those scars. It’s fucking brilliant, and has pretty much confirmed that Elijah Wood as a producer is someone I need to keep an eye on.