Are the movies finally getting mental illness right?

On Boxing Day, Cannes award-winner Renata Reinsve returns in Sentimental Value as an actor dealing with stage fright and depression. February sees Kristen Stewart explore addiction issues in her directorial debut The Chronology of Water. Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling, which won the Jury prize at Cannes for its story of four German women across a century, is yet to receive a UK release date.

Cinema has a long history of getting mental illness wrong. In Frames of Mind: a History of Neuropsychiatry on Screen, leading neuroscientist Eelco Wijdicks describes how cinema has repeatedly distorted psychological conditions and their treatments: whether demonising the use of electroshock therapy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or exaggerating violence from the mentally ill. Not all psychopaths are killers and not all killers are psychopaths. 

Add to this that when the person suffering is a woman, there’s also a long history of misdiagnosis, mistreatment and misogyny to contend with. The word “hysteria” alone has a long history of misuse to this day. Even films that attempt to deal honestly with the lived experiences of someone in the midst of psychosis face the difficulty of evoking an experience that is utterly foreign to many in the audience. 

The outside often gives us no realistic notion of what the person is going through. In Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, hands come out of the walls to grab Catherine Deneuve, and Alfred Hitchcock uses a dolly zoom technique in Vertigo to give us James Stewart’s perspective of an intense phobia of heights, but these film-makers are exceptional in coming up with ingenious ways of conveying how it feels when everything is off. 

In Die, My Love,  Ramsay’s first film since the Joaquin Phoenix-starring You Were Never Really Here in 2017, Lawrence plays Grace, a mother who is dealing with her hapless partner, Jackson – played with doofus charm by Robert Pattinson – as well as her own feelings of alienation in the face of new motherhood. 

Whether or not this is a film about postnatal depression is an open question. Ramsay is not an “issue” film-maker and her film isn’t easily categorised. Grace suffers from hallucinations, implying a more deeply rooted condition. 

For her part, Lawrence gives a bravura performance, raw in its intensity as she literally claws at the walls. Yet she leavens it with a grounded wit even as she teeters on the edge. Sound plays an intentionally intrusive role. The buzzing of a fly is amplified to become unbearable.  

As Lidia finds support in her sister, so Grace is truly seen by her mother-in-law, played beautifully by Sissy Spacek. By contrast, Jackson’s solution is to smother Grace in family love and forced normality, as Peter Falk treats Gena Rowlands in the classic John Cassavetes film A Woman Under the Influence, a film that Ramsay has certainly considered.   

Another Gena Rowlands film (Opening Night) is given a nod in Sentimental Value, which opens with Renata Reinsve’s actress, Nora, desperately trying to avoid taking the stage just as the curtain is about to go up. It is comic, farcical, frustrating and sad, and rendered all the more ironic in that she is supposed to be playing that uber-“hysterical” woman Medea.  

There has been a suicide attempt, we later learn, and a history of depression in the family. Her grandmother took her own life, an episode which her film director father (Stellan Skarsgard) is attempting to bring to the screen. Joachim Trier’s film is the most composed of the films mentioned, as Nora’s problems are hidden from other characters and, to some degree, the audience. Her turmoil is gradually and obliquely conveyed, and Reinsve once more gives a performance in which her fragility is occasionally glimpsed through her Nordic composure and good humour.

In The Chronology of Water, Imogen Poots plays Lidia Yuknavitch, a young woman in the ‘90s recalling her childhood, the abuse perpetrated by her father on her and her sister, and her issues with alcohol and drug addiction. The script is based on Yuknavitch’s memoir and was co-written with Andy Mingo, her husband. The film is intense and uncomfortable to watch. The sound design is intentionally harsh. Slaps resound, and the scratch of a pencil on a pad feels like nails on a wall.  

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There are moments of potential relief. Yuknavitch finds consolation in a guitar strummer with a gentle soul who ultimately is too passive for her wild swings of mood and her ravenous hunger for life/self-destruction. As in all these films, solidarity comes in the form of sisters, in this case her elder sister, played soulfully by Thora Birch. 

Finally, Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, who is played brilliantly here by an unrecognisable Jim Belushi, offers Lidia mentorship in a creative writing programme, which launches her career and gives her an outlet for the writing she has been using as a release since she was a child. 

Sound of Falling tells the story of multiple generations of one family living in a farmhouse in Germany throughout the 20th century and into the 21st. The despair many of the women feel is largely due to the way they are treated by other family members and the constraints on their lives. 

Patriarchy and a century of upheavals contribute to the instability in significant ways. But the film transcends the suffering to create a poetic, rhyming portrait of womanhood, which, despite its hardships, somehow achieves community and resilience. There’s a gothic magic to it.

All of these films show an increased consciousness that we are undergoing a revolution in how mental health is perceived. Rather than thinking of it as a crisis, the films strive to comprehend the experiences of the women who must live with these realities. 

Recognition and love and empathy don’t necessarily solve these issues – what does solving it even mean in such a context? – but life becomes more liveable, and that is what truly counts.