Hypochondriac (2022) starts by announcing that is it “based on a real breakdown”, and you quickly believe it. Whilst you may, throughout the film, understand that the protagonist is undergoing a mental health trauma with all of the hallucinations and sensory overload this can bring, it nonetheless feels very real, immediate and personal, something which distinguishes it from a number of other ‘mental health as monstrous’ horror films.
The film starts in Will’s childhood, to the sound of breaking glass. Frightened out of sleep, Twelve year old Will (the excellent Ian Inigo) follows the sound, finding a shattered mirror in the bathroom sink and – reflected in what’s left of it – his mother, who grabs at him, insisting that he go somewhere with her. Her appearance startles the boy as if she were an intruder; that, along with Will’s later passive, pained exhaustion, tells us that this isn’t the first time that his mother’s manic episodes have taken their toll on him. When the worst seems over, it isn’t, not really; the next day, other kids cajole and question him when she doesn’t turn up to pick them up, which underlines his feelings of isolation more. She’s been admitted to hospital; Will’s father is very matter-of-fact about this, which makes the boy’s disorientation and fear more marked.
There’s a moment of ‘oh, thank god’ when the film moves on by eighteen years. Will (Zach Villa) is now grown up and – okay, good even. He works as a potter, he makes good money and he has a boyfriend, Luke (Devon Graye). However, he is thrown off course by a sudden raft of phonecalls and a package from his mother, who has been absent from his life for a decade; he has even told Luke she’s deceased. Her calls and voicemails – paranoid, threatening, unintelligible – trigger something in Will; it’s mainly dizziness and disorientation at first, but soon more and more symptoms begin to occur. These include visual and aural hallucinations, which begin to really take hold when Will and Luke attempt a weekend getaway to try and address some of his buried traumas.
The timid, tired boy at the start sets an important aspect of the tone in Hypochondriac, in that it shows it’s okay to be scared by someone else’s mental illness. The impact of this kind of thing in a family member, particularly a caregiver, must be immense; were we only to establish this in flashback having met the adult Will, I think the film would have lost out on elements of that. Yes, illness is involuntary, but this kind of manic episode also terrifies people, exasperates people and can harm them in many ways – hence Will’s own breakdown, nearly two decades on, and its own impact on others. Fear is the trigger for his own issues. It’s appropriate, then, that his fear soon takes the physical form of a predator, though overblown/unreal in the vein of Donnie Darko: there is more to unpack here, but the very close focus on Will, whose certainty in reality begins to slip, is more than enough on its own – even without the literal personification.
Other, lighter touches are also very effective: the repeated image of a poster, a cutesy image which looks to be promoting champagne (in doctors’ offices?) keeps catching Will’s eye, until it feels like a running bad joke, a bizarre moment of humour; there are others, like the inappropriate boss (who would date him if he was straight but sack him if he was sick) and the dudebro doctor, whose medical advice sounds like something from Sports Illustrated. This works because it maintains a link with the mundane, where everything ticks along as it ever did. But also, it shows how personally disinterested, or uninterested a lot of people are, and how little they help Will when an early intervention could have benefitted him. He gets told over and over, like a catchphrase, that “stress” does a lot, and that the mind can have a big impact on the body. Well, yeah. You empathise with Will, and also with Luke, as their relationship has a real warmth, even when things get to their worst between them. All in all, Hypochondriac is a heavy, unsettling but engrossing watch, with likeable characters you really wish the best. It moves between terrifying and life-affirming very effectively, and offers a poignant glimpse at breakdown from a very intimate perspective.
Hypochondriac (2022) featured at the Fantasia International Film Festival 2022. Look out for the film at the UK’s FrightFest in August.