Mark Reviews Movies: HYPOCHONDRIAC

Hypochondriac, XYZ Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 28, 2022

There's little that's predictable about mental illness. That's true of its causes—if some genetic predisposition will actually reveal itself and what will actually trigger its symptoms. It's a terrifying situation, then, to suspect or know that one might or is dealing with some mental health issue at any given moment, and writer/director Addison Heimann's Hypochondriac lives within that frightening state of certain uncertainty.

Our protagonist knows something awful is about to happen to him. He just doesn't know when, how, or why that process will begin. Maybe it has already happened for Will (Zach Villa), because he inherited some condition from his mother, his mother's erratic and sometimes violent behavior did something to him, or some other matter of a chemical imbalance or circumstance in his life has planted the seed of chaos in his mind. It's growing there, and the only question that remains is when and to what extent that inner chaos will overtake his life.

Heimann appropriately frames Will's story as a horror tale. It's appropriate both in the sense that the mode of storytelling provides a feeling of what this experience is like and in the way that the approach never feels exploitative, derisive, or undercutting of that experience.

The film opens with text announcing that this story is "based on a true breakdown," and we will leave any theorizing as to what that specifically means out of this discussion of the film. For our part as an audience, it doesn't matter if this is based on the filmmaker's own experiences, what happened to someone he knows closely or as an acquaintance, or just some story Heimann read or heard about a complete stranger at some point. There's a feeling of authenticity here that matters much more than the source of the story's foundation.

That story begins with a younger Will (played by Ian Inigo), who desperately tries to help his mother (played by Marlene Forte), known only as "Mom" throughout the film, with her bipolar disorder. His father (played by Chris Doubek), a dismissive attorney with a sense of compassion that's minimal to non-existent, is little help in that regard, and during one of Mom's episodes, she suspects her husband is conspiring against her.

She takes Will to a motel, and during their stay, Mom tries to strangle her son, before stopping in a moment of clarity. The next day, Dad has her detained by the police and sent to a facility, and the last real impression Will has of his mother is a bloody knife on the floor of the kitchen.

The prologue is history for a now-adult Will, who works as a potter, has a seemingly stable relationship with a boyfriend of eight months named Luke (Devon Graye), and helps a co-worker through a panic attack (He insists that he cured himself of his own attacks). The rest of the story is about Will's increasing fear that the history will repeat itself.

Mom keeps calling, for example, despite his insistence that she died more than a decade ago, and she leaves him paranoid messages about his life and Luke's untrustworthiness. The way Heimann uses the character of the mother, who only exists as a voice apart from the prologue and in some footage from a camera the father installed in the kitchen, as such a point of uncertainty is quite ingenious. She either doesn't exist, meaning that her voice is both the vestige of what haunts Will and a manifestation of his own thoughts, or she does, which really doesn't change anything that she represents for Will. The latter option, though, does add a sense of external tension that magnifies the internal one.

The film does play with our viewing and understanding of reality beyond the mother, but apart from one sequence near the end, it doesn't attempt to cheat with that perspective. Will's troubles begin with pain in his arms, which he writes off as failing to stretch before working, but soon, he also experiences dizzy spells and a mental fog. After some debates with the supportive Luke, Will finally goes to a doctor, who assumes his symptoms are stress-related (and scolds Will for looking up dire possibilities on the internet), and when they don't stop, he goes to more doctors, who say the same thing.

The dizziness and fog become hallucinations of someone in a wolf costume. From there, his physical symptoms and injuries (There's a boy in that wolf costume at one point, calling for help from within the kiln at his workplace) worsen, while the hallucinations become more intense. Eventually, Will thinks he has learn more about his mother to get at the root cause of whatever is plaguing his mind.

In terms of story, there isn't much more than that, but Heimann's film isn't really about this story or even its characters beyond those broad strokes—the troubled Will, the compassionate Luke, the apathetic father and others, the unconcerned doctors, etc. Instead, it's about viewing the fear and rise of mental illness through the lens and methods of a horror story.

That might sound manipulative or worse, but there's nothing cheap about Heimann's approach to that element. His method isn't about easy scares or faking out the audience. It's in generating an atmosphere of mounting unease and insecurity. In putting us in that mindset with Will (played with aching vulnerability by Villa), Hypochondriac becomes more than a simple horror tale or some gimmicky metaphor. There's genuine empathy between the lines.

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