What is it like to live with psychosis? Some mental illnesses – for example schizophrenia, the most spoken about of them – can involve experiencing delusions. ‘Horse Girl’ accurately renders what it is like for a person to have delusions but it does so by alternating between the point of view of the person with the mental illness and the person – in different scenes it’s different people – who is with her.
Some people might misunderstand the significance of some scenes, for example the dream scenes early on in the piece where Sarah (Alison Brie) sees herself lying down in a white room. As she turns her head to the left and to the right she sees two people lying near her: a man and a woman. If you misunderstand the purpose of this scene your comprehension of the creation of meaning on the part of the filmmakers will be compromised. I’ll touch on this issue again later in this article but I won’t spoil the plot.
The writing is as good as the casting. John Reynolds’ Darren (Sarah’s love interest), Molly Shannon’s Joan (Sarah’s colleague at the art and crafts shop she works at), Debbie Ryan’s Nikki (Sarah’s flatmate), and Jay Duplass’ Ethan (Sarah’s social worker) all perform vital roles without which the drama would not work. They all play it straight, with enough emotion to show how strange is Sarah’s behaviour but without overdoing it. The balance is perfect.
The opening scene elicits the kind of low-level anxiety the movie retails in: you see the sky through the branches of trees and the camera simply zooms in on the cloudless blue expanse. This shot has two roles, one of which is to establish a baseline of emotion for the viewer. From the start: strangeness.
Foregrounding is also done by the next shot, which shows a hand holding scissors that are cutting cloth. The cloth motif recurs again and again in the movie. The shot of the cloth being cut humorously but dramatically signals to the term “schizophrenia”, which is also commonly and confusingly (because inaccurately) known as “split personality”. Laid over the top of it is a conversation between Joan and Sarah that centres on the topic of ancestry. This is another of the movie’s major themes and it links to the images showing cloth being cut because of the necessity of a kind of twinning involved in reproduction. To create a human an embryo splits into, then two again, then again and again etcetera until a foetus is formed. Reproduction also necessitates a man and a woman, with the structure of the DNA itself having two strings of proteins. Genesis 2:20-21 says
If you live with a disease, such as schizophrenia, that involves delusions you can sometimes feel that the universe is talking to you. You see correspondences between things that might not actually exist. Your sense of perception can also be altered, so that you think you see or hear something that isn’t really there. To illustrate these things, the filmmakers make Sarah experience what are known as “ideas of reference”. These are notions inside the head of the person with the mental illness that have a single, unifying theme. Everything seen or smelt or heard or touched or tasted links back to it.
The science is correct in this movie and I was completely convinced by it; it has justifiably garnered critical applause. I fear that some critics have misunderstood some aspects of the movie, however, and so it is likely that many viewers will also do so.
A couple of years ago I read a sci-fi novel by Christopher Priest titled ‘The Affirmation’ (1981) that renders in some detail what it is like to have delusions. Since that time, ‘Horse Girl’ is the only cultural product that I have seen that does the job as well. Or even better than that wonderful novel!
Some people might misunderstand the significance of some scenes, for example the dream scenes early on in the piece where Sarah (Alison Brie) sees herself lying down in a white room. As she turns her head to the left and to the right she sees two people lying near her: a man and a woman. If you misunderstand the purpose of this scene your comprehension of the creation of meaning on the part of the filmmakers will be compromised. I’ll touch on this issue again later in this article but I won’t spoil the plot.
The writing is as good as the casting. John Reynolds’ Darren (Sarah’s love interest), Molly Shannon’s Joan (Sarah’s colleague at the art and crafts shop she works at), Debbie Ryan’s Nikki (Sarah’s flatmate), and Jay Duplass’ Ethan (Sarah’s social worker) all perform vital roles without which the drama would not work. They all play it straight, with enough emotion to show how strange is Sarah’s behaviour but without overdoing it. The balance is perfect.
The opening scene elicits the kind of low-level anxiety the movie retails in: you see the sky through the branches of trees and the camera simply zooms in on the cloudless blue expanse. This shot has two roles, one of which is to establish a baseline of emotion for the viewer. From the start: strangeness.
Foregrounding is also done by the next shot, which shows a hand holding scissors that are cutting cloth. The cloth motif recurs again and again in the movie. The shot of the cloth being cut humorously but dramatically signals to the term “schizophrenia”, which is also commonly and confusingly (because inaccurately) known as “split personality”. Laid over the top of it is a conversation between Joan and Sarah that centres on the topic of ancestry. This is another of the movie’s major themes and it links to the images showing cloth being cut because of the necessity of a kind of twinning involved in reproduction. To create a human an embryo splits into, then two again, then again and again etcetera until a foetus is formed. Reproduction also necessitates a man and a woman, with the structure of the DNA itself having two strings of proteins. Genesis 2:20-21 says
God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs and then closed up the place with flesh. Then [God] made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.The peach coloured cloth that Sarah likes even resembles flesh; the tarot card reader in the shop (Mary Apick) says it’s a calming colour. In hue the colour peach is similar to the colour of Willow, the horse Sarah visits from time to time, and it’s even closer to it in tone. To borrow from the Bible serves neither to cast aspersions nor to seek to secure unwarranted gravitas; it’s rather to show how Sarah’s fecund imagination lends strong meaning to small things. The feeling of awe and even of fear that a delusion can inspire in the heart of the person experiencing it might only accurately be reflected by mirroring the effects on believers of texts such as this. One man’s horse is another man’s nightmare.
If you live with a disease, such as schizophrenia, that involves delusions you can sometimes feel that the universe is talking to you. You see correspondences between things that might not actually exist. Your sense of perception can also be altered, so that you think you see or hear something that isn’t really there. To illustrate these things, the filmmakers make Sarah experience what are known as “ideas of reference”. These are notions inside the head of the person with the mental illness that have a single, unifying theme. Everything seen or smelt or heard or touched or tasted links back to it.
The science is correct in this movie and I was completely convinced by it; it has justifiably garnered critical applause. I fear that some critics have misunderstood some aspects of the movie, however, and so it is likely that many viewers will also do so.
A couple of years ago I read a sci-fi novel by Christopher Priest titled ‘The Affirmation’ (1981) that renders in some detail what it is like to have delusions. Since that time, ‘Horse Girl’ is the only cultural product that I have seen that does the job as well. Or even better than that wonderful novel!
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