Not a huge fan of asylum flicks, tbh. I tend to forget between one and the next, though. But they make me uncomfortable primarily because they evoke this existential sense of waiting. Being stuck between two places, two times, two selves. I think this is probably a genre of sort that reaches beyond films about mental illness, but I have to rake my memory to further develop this theory. Either way, this is kind of how I’ve felt my entire adult life, transitory, in between things that feel more permanent in absentia than my manifest state, and that’s probably why these films make me uncomfortable.

Like American SciFi struggles to use colors outside of the greys, it seems asylum flicks struggle with colors outside of white. I struggle to remember anything visually besides that sterile blanche. But something that stuck out to me was the music, at least the scene wherein Skeeter Davis' The End of the World plays on repeat. I love that song, and the scene was, as may be apparent by the choice, pivotal in the film, in the lead’s development.

The acting was, of course, phenomenal. An asylum movie, or any that depends on a cast of characters with which there is something society has to understand as wrong, demands impeccable acting, of course, and the cast, surprisingly familiar even to a modern cinemaphile, delivered.

Something felt surprisingly under-explored, however, in a film with such a predominately female cast, was the lack of exploration of the parallels of patriarchy and the mental health industry. The power dynamics between staff and patient. It spent much more time on sentimentality than dissecting society. Telling a story about healing while challenging the status quo, especially that most strongly in effect four decades prior, is a bit of a challenge, however. I’m unbothered by the choice of exploring emotion over oppression, but it’s hard for me not to think about these things.