“Hypochondriac” immediately tells viewers that it’s “based on a true breakdown,” certainly providing a new wrinkle in the now-overused “true story” clause. However, clarity of hindsight isn’t a major virtue in this first adventure film by writer and director Addison Hyman.
Offbeat independent drama features Zack Villa as a Los Angelian whose turbulent past threatens to break up his domestic partnership and his hardened mind. The combination of gay protagonists, exploration of mental illness, horror metaphors, and surreal elements alluding to Donnie Darko makes for an ambitious mix that commands attention, even if the somewhat disorienting asymmetric results are more effortless than insightful.
After a festival tour that includes a midnight pier at SXSW and a proper slot at genre-focused Fantasia, XYZ Films will open the film in limited release on July 29, with a digital and VOD release after August 4.
An introduction reminiscent of the coolers of the ’60s and ’70s after Psych – where my mom was often a formative psychic scar factor – has little Lindo aka Will (Ian Inego) at the mercy of his uneasy mother (Marlyn Forte). After experiencing paranoid delusions, she drags him from their Southern California home into a hotel room, where she nearly strangles him to death before she regains feeling enough to commit herself to the asylum. He’s left to take care of his estranged father (Chris Dubeck).
Eighteen years later, the now 30-year-old Will is a potter, notwithstanding his PTSD issues lingering in enough control that he can calm the onslaught of his classmate’s anxiety (Yumari Morales), as well as endure the photo gallery owner’s unbearable boss. (Madeleine Zima). He’s also got a good one with Luke (Devon Graye), her eight-month-old boyfriend who lives with him. But the past rears its ugly head when my mother, incommunicado for a decade, began flooding him with strange phone messages and packages he tried to ignore.
It could not be a coincidence that he soon began experiencing dizzy spells, disturbing visions, workplace accidents, nausea, and more. A group of consulted medical and psychiatric professionals, played very recklessly by many familiar faces (including Paget Brewster and Adam Bush), assured him there was nothing to worry about. However, things get worse, especially once he makes the baffling decision to eat some psychedelic mushrooms that Ma carefully mailed.
That misguided journey resurrects the long-sleeping personal ghost of a man – a wolf with glowing eyes that terrifies him, even when it turns out not to be a “real” supernatural danger but a figment of his tormented subconscious. These hallucinations quickly jeopardize Will’s job, relationship, and health, as well as (possibly) those around him.
“Hypochondriac”—a title that seems somewhat irrelevant, outside of the sequences in which many doctors and impersonators downplay our hero’s symptoms—has a complex agenda that is only partially articulated in Heimann’s text, while perhaps being a bit overexpressive in its very crowded direction. The tactics visible here generally include the 360-degree camera, overlays, on-screen text graphics, increased color, blurred, distorted, Rorschach-like images, etc. The intent is to evoke a disturbing and nightmarish mood. Often, though, it feels more like a frantic grab bag of sampling techniques.
It also doesn’t help that filmmaking is so flashy even before Will loses his grip: He’s introduced as an adult in a disturbing music video genre scene of dancing in a pottery studio, followed by an excuse to improvise rap and beatboxing. Villa (who played Richard Ramirez in “American Horror Story”) is duly grateful. But the film’s serious handling of mental illness could have benefited greatly from being a shorter restraint when it came to inventing cute commercials, mostly in scenes with sympathetic Graye. When he’s not a puppy, he’s running a whole gamut of hysteria. We often get over the top for impact, very few moments here as powerful as a long steady shot in which the two men have a painfully honest breakup conversation.
In fact, despite all the voices and anger that went into clearing up Will’s mental clutter, we didn’t really get much diagnostic control over him. Sub-figures are often caricatured, providing less ground in which to make sense of his plight. When the film ends with a sense of acceptance and at least partial recovery, there is more sense that he was on a “journey” than there is certainty about what came before or that he has recovered from it almost completely. Given that Hypochondriac is primarily an expressive picture of mental ill health rather than a genre movie (despite all the horror and thriller elements), this lack is a major flaw.
However, its style and theme are bold enough choices to impress you, especially in the often adopted context of current LGBTQ cinema. While not every idea here works, Dustin Supencheck’s widescreen cinematography-led technology and design package puts the best of it all at the service of Heimann’s vision.
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