Tag Archives: Mental illness

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: DOGRA MAGRA (1988)

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ドグラ・マグラ

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DIRECTED BY: Toshio Matsumoto

FEATURING: Yôji Matsuda, Shijaku Katsura, , Eri Misawa

PLOT: Waking in a sparse cell, a young man tries to piece together the reason for his confinement, assisted—and thwarted—by adversarial psychologists.

Still from Dogra Magra (1988)

 

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: From the get-go, the viewer is in for disorientation and dismay, spiked with foetal philosophizing and sinister slides.

COMMENTS: Conspiracy, by its nature, is insidious—lurking in the background until the moment of impact. Consider the conspiracies of history: events from over a millennia ago, aging and festering, awaiting their catalyst. The conspiracies of society can blossom into a nefarious constellation of constraints and crucibles. And perhaps most perfidious of all, there is the conspiracy of the mind, wherein the dark elements of the subconscious band together to wreak havoc on waking life.

So imagine all these conspiracies themselves colluding, and you can glimpse the terrible fate of Ichirô Kure (Yôji Matsuda). He awakens to a blurry yellow light, rising from the floor in troubled wonder, unable to remember his name, his past, or even his face. Enter an older gentleman, going by the name Professor Wakabayashi, who shares with the young man a tale set 1100 years prior. This dark narrative of a mad artist who wishes to capture decomposition, a fixation beginning with the corpse of his murdered bride, is related by one Professor Masaki, hissing out from a phonographic record from beyond the grave.

Or is Masaki actually dead? Director Toshio Matsumoto depicts his protagonist’s madness with seamless aplomb, but that by no means makes things any clearer. Poisoned flashbacks shudder coherency, as do imagined encounters that appear all too real. Kure is a brilliant student, or was, who had begun groundbreaking research of the mind—we observe him lecturing to a gallery peopled by asylum inmates, with none other than Professor Masaki joining the growing chaos chanting an “Ahodara Sutra” (or “Fool’s Prayer”) as he traipses merrily through the classroom. Or maybe Kure is just lecturing to himself in his cell. As with the cryptic prenatal visions, little is clear aside from these facts: Kure’s mother was killed; Kure’s fiancée was killed; and the two professors observing the fellow gravely overstepped their ethical bounds.

Intriguingly for a film engrossed by narrative slight-of-hand and the malleability of memory, the truth can be found in the film within-the-film. Professor Masaki records the wards of his care, all undergoing a “freedom” regiment akin to the inmates chronicled in Poe’s “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether.” A chance encounter with a janitor leads to a projector in an abandoned storage room, its information triggering a cyclonic hallucination. The elements swirl and bombard the pitiable Ichirô Kure, as the three agents of conspiracy crash down together on his consciousness.

He awakens to a blurry yellow light.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…[A] puzzling work that blends reality with fantasy. I expected a horror movie of sorts. While that classification does kind of work, labelling it as such doesn’t do the film any favors. This is one of those movies that defies genre classification.” — Bret Oswald, Irish Film Critic

Dogra Magra

Dogra Magra

  • A man wakes in an asylum with no memory. Dr Wakabayashi helps him to recall his past in which he killed his bride on their wedding day

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: DECORADO (2025)

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DIRECTED BY: Alberto Vázquez

FEATURING: Voices of Asier Hormaza, Aintzane Gamiz, Kandido Uranga (original Spanish); David Goldstein, Marissa Parness, Peter Giles (English dub)

PLOT: Arnold, a mouse, feels like he’s trapped in an artificial reality.

Still from Decorado (2025)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Decorado combines two seemingly out of place aesthetics—cute cartoons and psychodrama—but also uses an Orwellian dystopia as camouflage to discuss themes that are far more existential in nature.

COMMENTS:  Alberto Vázquez’s animations distinctly combine the cartoonish with a heavy dose of pessimism and existentialist dread. His latest feature effort, expanded from his eponymous short film, is no different. What is new is the ambiguous nature of the surrounding environment, a perfect metaphor for the confusion and angst of these anthropomorphic animals. But let’s start from the beginning.

The story revolves around mouse Arnold and his wife Maria. They live in a town structured like a miniature capitalist system, where a major corporation named ALMA governs everything. Both mice are social outcasts. Arnold remains unemployed for years, while Maria struggles to build a career as a graphic designer. Feeling exhausted by this way of life, Arnold wants to believe there is something more, a figurative and/or literal way of escape. A dark forest surrounds his hometown, and he can’t stop wondering about what might exist beyond that. Perhaps somewhere beyond lies the ideal world of absolute freedom and truth that he desperately desires.

The parabolic tone of this plot is clear. Arnold lives in an Orwellian nightmare where extensive surveillance is the norm, everyone takes medicines to stay calm and happy, and class differences are tremendous. As Arnold rebels, he finds companionship in an eclectic variety of characters, but at the same time he pays a price, by discovering the true nature of his cage.

This is not a social parable, even if it starts like one. It existentialist—almost nihilistic—in nature. Later revelations recall The Truman Show (1998), as the line between what is real and what is a facade starts to blur. That film, however, had a clear ending and catharsis, offering a concrete explanation for its world. Here, no easy answers are given. As the owl-guardian of the forest says, in this case “the (whole) World is a stage” and, perhaps, there is nothing beyond that other than the vastness of a cosmic void.

From a philosophical standpoint, Decorado has some parallelisms with Alejandro Jodorowsky‘s The Holy Mountain (1973): both movies deconstruct ideas regarding salvation and a ultimate truth by constantly reminding us, in a Brechtian way, that everything is  artificial, props and cardboard cutouts on a theatrical stage. Decorado is undoubtedly darker in tone, however, and not so explicitly didactic.

Decorado‘s narrative also works as a portrait of psychopathology. Vázquez’s works are always interested  in exploring the world of the mentally ill. In Birdboy (2015) a teenage boy shows symptoms of schizophrenia; Unicorn Wars (2022) studies the mindset of a sociopath. Here, Arnold’s wife struggles with depression—in the form of a Tinker Bell-like fairy that follows her around—while he is diagnosed with derealization disorder. Clinically defined, derealization (also known as depersonalization or dissociation) is a sense of detachment from reality—a gut feeling that something is off about the world. Decorado can therefore also be interpreted, through a strictly psychological prism, as an externalization of Arnold’s disorder. A work of art can be read in many ways, after all.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This paranoid and dystopian vision of life under capitalism is grim but funny—surreally cartoonish yet filled with sarcastic adult ennui, like Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat In Space punctuated by a dose of Happy Tree Friends‘ goofy gore, eventually approaching something fearful and self-referential enough to evoke the existential absurdity of Charlie Kaufman.”–Jacob Oller, AV Club (contemporaneous)

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: TIERRA [EARTH] (1996)

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DIRECTED BY: Julio Medem

FEATURING: Carmelo Gómez, Emma Suárez, Silke, Karra Elejalde, Nancho Novo

PLOT: A man fresh out of a mental hospital takes a job fumigating a scourge of wood lice in the countryside in Spanish wine country, where he finds himself irresistibly drawn to both a comely young wife who is neglected by her farmer husband and a spirited wild child who is being kept as a mistress by that same husband.

Still from Tierra (1996)

COMMENTS: Ángel is cool as a cucumber. At least, Ángel as portrayed by Carmelo Gómez is cool as a cucumber. Looking like Judd Nelson at the moment when he might have been the sexiest member of the Brat Pack, he’s utterly unflappable, rolling into town in his exterminator truck and telling the residents how he will wipe out the wood lice that have been making their wine taste “earthy.” Is earthy bad? You wouldn’t think so to watch Ángel take a taste. On paper, he ought to be the most unsettled man in Spain: mental stability in question, with a trip to a sanitarium that everyone knows about, his life narrated by an alter ego that constantly reminds him of his mortality, reduced to killing bugs in a dusty nowheresville, and deeply attracted to two beautiful but distinctly opposite women, each of whom is being kept by a possessive and violent man. Ángel ought to be up to his ears in anxiety. But there he sits, laid back like the cool philosophy professor, taking things as they come, man. It’s fascinating.

Tierra is notably odd for being a character study about a character with very little character. Ángel keeps finding himself in extreme circumstances: encountering a lightning strike victim, arousing the ire of a full Roma encampment, accidentally (?) shooting a rival during a town-wide hunt for wild boars. In every case he is preternaturally calm, taking in the circumstances with the passive contentment of a saint—which the film suggests he may be, hinting more than once that he has had a life-changing experience. On the other hand, we’re also told that his stint in the mental ward was due to an “overactive imagination.” Whatever Ángel’s truth may be, Gómez plays it close to the vest.

It would be completely reasonable for Ángel to be torn between the two young women he meets in town. Ángela, the fetching young mom with a name that screams out how in sync the two must be, is played by Suárez with an aching need that she hopes the newcomer can fill. Meanwhile, Silke’s sexpot Mari always seems to be bending over a pool table with painted-on jeans and a come-hither stare, but she is just as desperate for the change in circumstances that Ángel could provide. But what exactly Ángel has to offer to either of them, beyond escape from the status quo, is not entirely clear. Medem manufactures some suspense over whether he will end up with the sweet mom or the hot chick, but neither the tension nor the choice is altogether convincing. 

In a review of another Medem film, a critic observed that “there’s the sense that he’s more interested in his ideas than in his people.” That suspicion permeates Tierra. The barrenness of the Spanish landscape captivates, creating an almost apocalyptic feel, and an outsider with a supernatural connection would absolutely fill a narrative void. But Medem’s affection for Ángel is such that his protagonist does nothing but win, which means that even the ideas aren’t all that compelling. Wherever Ángel and his new companion are headed, there is little reason to worry about them. No wonder he’s so cool all the time. He never has to feel the heat.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Like Medem’s two most recent films, ‘Tierra’ (Spanish for ‘Earth’) is an intricately structured, densely allusive affair. Its central figure is an itinerant exterminator named Angel (Carmelo Gomez) — a nod in the direction of Luis Bunuel’s ‘The Exterminating Angel,’ you might think, but only in the sense that both films draw water from the same surrealist pond… Despite its affectations, however — thanks mainly to a stunning ocher cinematographic palette, rock-solid acting and a story that’s as robustly sensual as it is otherworldly — ‘Tierra’ keeps its two feet (two of everything, in fact) firmly grounded on this Earth.” – Michael O’Sullivan, Washington Post (repertory review)

(This movie was nominated for review by Morgan. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Tierra

Tierra
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Reader Recommendations

READER RECOMMENDATION: THE MANIPULATOR (1971)

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Reader Recommendation from James Auburn

AKA BJ Presents; B.J. Lang Presents 

Beware

“…a motion picture so haunted… it will never be shown!” – B.J. Lang Presents trailer

DIRECTED BY: Yabo Yablonsky

FEATURING: , ,

PLOT: The film takes place almost entirely on a dusty soundstage. B.J. Lang (Rooney) has kidnapped a woman he refers to as Carlotta (Luana Anders of “Easy Rider”) and has tied her to a wheelchair. Lang spends nearly 90 minutes tormenting Carlotta, screaming at her, forcing her to recite lines to an imaginary movie, and spooning baby food into her mouth, among other indignities. 

Still from the manipulator (1971)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: This acid-damaged wannabe-arthouse film has stupefied even jaded psychotronic film freaks. Every “hip” avant-garde editing gimmick in the psychedelic-era toolbox is utilized: strobe lights, fish-eye lens, solarization, freeze-frames, quick-cut frames of random images, flashbacks/flash-forwards, slow-motion/fast-motion, etc. The viewing experience feels like a 90-minute long, 104-degree-fever hallucination that makes you question your own sanity. The uncomfortably cathartic performances from its two leads seem like a blend of acting-workshop exercises and heavy existential therapy put on film. Through extended monologues, the central character explores his own inner turmoil and waxes philosophical about life and show business, and as he wallows in his own insanity, the movie itself follows suit.

 

COMMENTS: Yes, one of the most demented movies you’ve ever seen starred Mickey Rooney—and he gives a psychotic tour-de-force performance that must be seen to be disbelieved.

In the opening scene, B.J. Lang enters the soundstage, as if to begin a routine day of work, passing cobwebbed props and backdrops; he sits down, and starts talking excitedly to thin air. Lang establishes himself as either a movie director who has gone insane, or an insane man who fancies himself a movie director; it’s never quite clear which. He runs a take of an imaginary movie scene while barking orders at mannequins and a film crew that exists only in his addled head. This opening segment culminates in a nightmarish two-minute freakout sequence with Lang screaming at two nude white-bodypainted figures (his parents? sure, why not) who cruelly laugh at him, over a screeching electronic racket. Suddenly: silence. Closeup: Lang is drenched in sweat, exhausted, as are our eardrums and sensibilities. What’s your threshold for cinematic insanity? You’ll know in the first ten minutes of The Manipulator.

We then discover Carlotta, tied to the wheelchair. Evidently she’s been there against her will for some time. For a long stretch, her only line is “I’m hungry, Mr. Lang!” She repeats it, again and again, with every different inflection she can muster (Lang spoon-feeds her a few Continue reading READER RECOMMENDATION: THE MANIPULATOR (1971) →

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE LIVING AND THE DEAD (2006)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Leo Bill, Roger Lloyd Pack, Kate Fahy

PLOT: The once-noble Brocklebank family struggles to cope with father Donald’s failing finances, mother Nancy’s terminal illness, and adult son James’ crippling paranoid schizophrenia. 

COMMENTS: Horror makes its bones on the power of surprise, but one particular strain of horror that often goes overlooked is the kind without surprise at all, where the outcome of an action can be seen from miles away and the emotional trigger is the dreadful sense of inevitability. You know you’re going to see something deeply unsettling, and that something unfolds steadily, irrevocably, and awfully. The Living and the Dead is all in on that kind of horror, the slow-motion trainwreck where you’re always aware that bad things are going to happen, and all that’s left is to hammer out the details.

The run-down country estate where we set our scene is the kind of place that must have been a Downton Abbey-style hub of activity a century ago but is now threadbare and barely functional owing to the occupants’ flailing attempts to manage the upkeep on their own. This would be enough plot to fill your standard British class drama, with matriarch Nancy’s chronic illness as a complicating factor. But The Living and the Dead has the additional wild card of James, an adult in appearance but possessing the mind and haphazard body control of a petulant 8-year old. He constantly demands a level of responsibility and respect that he can never merit, and it’s obvious that his beleaguered parents have yielded him some control—most notably, access to his own medication—out of sheer overwork and desperation. And this is where you immediately start to see the terrible pieces falling into place. Lloyd Pack’s David is a doting father tempered with British restraint and propriety, but as the sole member of the household with relatively good physical and mental health, he has more on his shoulders than he can reasonably bear. Meanwhile, Fahy’s sickly mom surely knows that she is not safe in James’ company but is literally powerless to overrule him. So we march toward the seemingly inevitable outcome, dreading the destination we know we must reach.

Bill commits in full, emphasizing James’ unmanageability and highlighting the nobility of Donald’s stalwart support. Without a trace of humor or sentimentality, the performance earns our pity while exposing the horror of the situation. Rumley accentuates the discomfort by using Requiem for a Dream-style techniques—bursts of fast-forward speed runs, shaky camera and double exposures, cacophonous soundtracking—to heighten the paranoia, confusion, and instability in James’ head. The director also slips in a crucial bit of misdirection late in the second act, stepping inside one of James’ delusions and blurring the line between reality and hallucination. James’ world is the peak of weirdness in The Living and the Dead, and it sets up the stark, unhappy drama of the film’s more grounded final scenes.

Rumley has said that he drew inspiration from his own mother’s terminal illness. If this is the dark metaphor for that experience, it was a gut-wrenching ordeal indeed. What proves weirdest about The Living and the Dead isn’t the characters or their circumstances, but the fact that we’re given a glimpse inside them, one which we already know we want to avoid. Rumley crafts a reminder that decline and death come for us all, as well as a warning that sometimes there’s an unpredictable pain that comes first.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A bizarre psychological study of degeneration and dependency, “The Living and the Dead” is a horror movie only in the most literal sense. Skirting genre conventions, Simon Rumley’s twisted feature inhabits shores where the gore is minimal and the demons unseen – neither of which makes it any less disconcerting… The travails of Britain’s inbred aristocracy have long been mined by its filmmakers, but rarely with such eccentricity or unrelieved ruthlessness.” – Jeannette Catsoulis, The New York Times (contemporaneous; subscription required)

(This movie was nominated for review by BlueYonder. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)