Hypochondriac, 2022.
Written and directed by Addison Heimann.
Starring Zach Villa, Devon Graye, Madeline Zima, Yumarie Morales, Marlene Forte, Chris Doubek, Paget Brewster, Adam Busch, Michael Cassidy, Peter Mensah, and Debra Wilson.
SYNOPSIS:
A young potter’s life devolves into chaos as he loses function of his body while being haunted by the physical manifestation of his childhood trauma.
Writer-director Addison Heimann’s feature debut Hypochondriac captures the loneliness of mental illness with surreal brio and emotional honesty, and though its bigger tonal swings won’t work for everyone, lead Zach Villa’s performance isn’t to be trifled with.
“Based on a real breakdown,” as its opening title informs us, Heimann’s film revolves around Will (Zilla), a young gay man who loves his job at a pottery shop and also his dashing boyfriend Luke (Devon Graye). However, Will lives day-to-day with the invasive mental spectres of a traumatic past, namely an incident where his bipolar mother (Marlene Forte) attempted to strangle him to death.
18 years later, this trauma manifests by way of increasingly disturbing hallucinations, including the presence of a man in a wolf costume, and eventually losing the function of his arms. As Will desperately seeks answers from the medical community, who don’t seem to have them, he wonders whether he’s destined to follow in his mother’s doomed footsteps.
More than anything, Heimann’s film absolutely nails the terrifying nature of a reality-warping mental condition, where one can’t trust their own senses and only wonder the places that this inherited timebomb might take them. The filmmaker captures the paranoia of both Will and his mother without veering into cartoon or caricature, ensuring this is an upsetting character study adorned with flecks of irreverent dark humour.
Much as horror has a time-honoured tradition of exploiting the mentally ill for easy scares, here the threat is largely one against the self, of how Will’s potent audio-visual hallucinations increasingly point to him soon enough harming himself. Yet Heimann’s most sympathetic moments are also the film’s most simple, illustrating how society pre-judges those with a mentally unwell label.
Will’s asshole father (Chris Doubek) scarcely believes his son’s condition is “real,” doctors offer patronising platitudes about Will simply being stressed, his boss (Madeline Zima) can’t fathom him taking a week off on mental health grounds, and even his well-meaning boyfriend is prejudiced in more subtle, unintended ways.
But this is still more a horror-thriller than a pure drama, and so Heimann walks a tricky tonal tightrope, to do justice to the real experiences of people like Will, but in a way that’s entertaining to a genre film audience. Will’s increasingly disturbing visions tap-dance right on the fringes of goofy absurdism at times – particularly a late-film scene where he imagines himself being rimmed by the guy in the wolf suit – yet for the most part capture the utter terror of one’s brain intruding upon itself.
Heimann also bravely inserts slivers of black comedy throughout which offer welcome levity without upending the overall unsettling tone. This somewhat unwieldy collision of moods won’t work for all, though; you’ll either give yourself over to it or you won’t. The slight skittishness feels fitting given the protagonist’s own, right up to an ending that refuses to provide easy, sunny answers.
A big part of the reason these elements cohere is Zach Villa’s strong performance as Will, pinballing between cheerily upbeat, begrudgingly sardonic, and then utterly vulnerable. There’s a self-loathing always percolating beneath the surface, per Will’s inability to overpower his illness, that feels so heartbreakingly real and teases out the stinging humanity of the piece in even its sillier moments.
Elsewhere Marlene Forte is very good in a small but memorable role as Will’s conspiracy-spouting mother, Madeline Zima is perfectly cast as Will’s disingenuous asshole boss, and Devon Graye brings a believable conflict to the part of Will’s boyfriend Luke. Paget Brewster also shows up briefly as Will’s childhood therapist, though sadly disappears after a single scene.
If at times feeling like a bit of a rough, uneven sketch, there’s a very heartfelt message beating at the core of this film, a film which boldly embraces the irreverent messiness of living with any crippling malady. Hypochondriac powerfully conveys the utter isolation caused by debilitating mental illness, and also how poorly society still provides for those suffering through psychological crises.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Shaun Munro – Follow me on Twitter for more film rambling.
