Chris’s review published on Letterboxd:
Jane Arden sculpted what seemed so unreachable and distant through a film that expresses her deepest terrors about an issue indifferently thrown away by the general public. Jane places us direclty into the eye of the storm, or the condition that we know as schizophrenia. We suffer it but we don't understand it, reflecting what Jane so strongly criticized—the powerlessness of a such a volatile "science" as is psychiatry and its branches. By being constantly exposed to these symptoms we get to a point where the line between what is natural and what is caused is blurred in such a heartrbreaking way that it feels impossible to not reconsider our view in what so many of us seem to normalize. Jane utilizes what so many of us are afraid to admit in a rather horrifying way, interwined with one of the most perfectly chosen excerpts of dialogue I've ever heard:
From Alice in Wonderland: "But I don’t want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can’t help that," said the Cat: "we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad."
"How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn’t have come here.”“To begin with," said the Cat, "a dog's not mad. You grant that?"
"I suppose so," said Alice
"Well, then," the Cat went on, "you see a dog growls when it's angry, and wags its tail when it's pleased. Now I growl when I'm pleased, and wag my tail when I'm angry. Therefore I'm mad."
With this apparently simple interaction Jane introduces us to her theory, one that reflects the indifference of medical/psychological treatment. It divides and fragments trying to place the broken glass' pieces together even though they don't belong to the same mirror. There's no peace because such an imprecise "science" fails to bring together the unthinkable, thus sacrificing the humanity of those under its submission because of the ignorance in such a delicate and ambiguous notion.