It’s good that people are able to talk openly about their mental health status. As much as it can easily be fetishised within certain Internet cultures, that is still preferable to when there was such a crippling stigma attached to it that no one talked about it, no one treated it seriously, and all we did was suffer in silence. I myself have been quite open (perhaps a little too open) about my own conditions and neuroses, which I mainly discuss on here to try and explain my own perspective when interpreting a given film.
But there’s something about that level of openness that can also be a serious problem, namely the effect it can on those listening in. Same with just about any other medical condition, if you spend too long reading about it, and start seeing connections to your own behaviours, it can make you worse. It can either exacerbate your own conditions, or even instil a psychosomatic effect where you convince yourself that that’s what’s happening, regardless of any evidence to the contrary. It’s one of the reasons why Googling medical symptoms is rarely (if ever) a good idea, and it’s the main reason why this film in particular taps into something unnervingly real.
Funded by its writer/producer/director Amy Seimetz (primarily from her wages for acting in the recent Pet Sematary remake, meaning at least something useful came out of that production), and largely inspired by her own experiences discussing anxiety attacks, this film treats morbid anxiety as contagion. A vague but ever-present feeling that you are going to die tomorrow, starting in-film with Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil) talking about her seemingly-near demise to Jane (Jane Adams), who tells her friends about it, who tell their friends, and etc. One by one, they all reach the conclusion that their lives are about to end through some nebulous force, and while it makes for some crushing reflections on what the mere existence of things like COVID can do for one’s mental state, its depictions of that proximity to death are where it reaches true poignancy.
While each character reaches the same conclusion, their reactions to said conclusion vary rather wildly. Some look into what can be done with their bodies post-mortem, some try and find comfort in death being a natural part of life, some question the importance they have placed on ideas and notions in their lives, and some just embrace the inevitable and retreat into the arms of family so that they aren’t alone when it happens. It’s like Ray Bradbury’s The Last Night Of The World mixed with the genre metaphor of It Follows, evoking very unsettling ideas about mortality and how much we kid ourselves about being ready to face it. The frequent bursts of technicolour in Jay Keitel’s cinematography add to the eerie and almost-otherworldly mood the story resides in.
I’ve had my share of anxiety attacks in the past, and while I can definitely see notes of the familiar in this film’s depiction of that kind of restless feeling of dread… honestly, knowing what inspired this film, I feel bad for even sharing that much. It sucks enough to go through this for one’s self, but the idea of unintentionally subjecting someone else to it is even worse. But it’s in that endless cycle of catastrophising, influenced as much by those around us as it is by the media we consume, that this film’s existence manages to justify itself, even in spite of potentially inflicting the very contagion it seeks to highlight.
Films like this exist to translate emotions, feelings, things that are difficult to put into words as is. And as something meant to unnerve, it accomplishes that task better than most, making for an exceptionally uneasy film that taps into something so raw, you can feel the sting of a light breeze brushing past it. Much like how Inside Out felt like the encapsulation of depression in the moment, this is the cerebral rabbit hole that is anxiety in all its twitchy moroseness.
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