Film of the Week: Words On Bathroom Walls (Cert 12, 112 mins) By Contributor Published: 09:00, 13 March 2021
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A teenager struggles to come to terms with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Picture: PA Photo/Sony Pictures Releasing/Jacob Yakob
Available from March 15 on Amazon Prime Video/BT TV Store/iTunes/Sky Store/TalkTalk TV Store and other download and streaming services
Starring: Charlie Plummer, Taylor Russell, Molly Parker, Walton Goggins, AnnaSophia Robb, Devon Bostick, Lobo Sebastian, Beth Grant.
Witty, introspective high school student Adam Petrizelli (Charlie Plummer) is diagnosed with schizophrenia, which manifests as a pervasive, spider-like darkness that leeches into his waking visions.
Lost in Space’s Taylor Russell), who he enlists to help him get his maths grades up. With his new pills bringing him welcome silence, Adam appears set for a bright future, that is, until the muscle-twitching side effects begin to affect his knife skills. As he contemplates abandoning his new regime and letting the voices back in, Adam also worries that Maya will discover the real him. What he doesn’t realise is that she has been holding back secrets of her own.
Supplied Based on the novel of the same name by Julia Walton,
Words on Bathroom Walls is a superior “teen disease of the week movie” that tries not to pull many punches with its depiction of schizophrenia.
“Words Written on Bathroom Walls” (MA)
WHEN movie makers, novelists and other kinds of dramatists try to massage schizophrenia into plots for their magnum opuses, one of the difficult problems that they need to resolve is getting inside the head of a sufferer. Wikipedia tells me that genetics, environment and altered brain chemistry and structure may play a role.
The title of Thor Freudenthal’s film about a schizophrenic adolescent boy is a coy American treatment of the common-or-garden variety of names for lavatories. This is no place for a catalogue of possible English-language synonyms. Nick Naveda has adapted a novel by Julia Walton that I surmise may have its genesis in a member of her family. All three have laboured mightily to get it right. They have five types of the complaint to choose from. Have they succeeded? Perhaps. Only a schizophrenic could give a reply capable of withstanding professional evaluation and even then there’s an 80 per cent chance of not get