‘Hypochondriac’ Review: A Wolf in L.A. Peep’s Clothing

“Hypochondriac” informs viewers correct absent that it is “based on a authentic breakdown,” which surely delivers a new wrinkle on the now-wildly-overused “true story” proviso. Nevertheless, clarity of hindsight is not a key advantage in this adventurous initially element by author-director Addison Heimann.

The offbeat indie drama options Zach Villa as a Los Angelean whose troubled earlier threatens to unravel his domestic partnership and his really sanity. The blend of homosexual protagonists, mental sickness exploration, horror tropes, and surreal factors that gesture towards “Donnie Darko” make for an formidable mix that retains focus, even if the uneven, to some degree muddled final results are in the end additional effortful than insightful.

Pursuing a competition tour that features a midnight berth at SXSW and fitting slot in genre-focused Fantasia, XYZ Films will open the film in constrained launch on July 29, with digital and VOD release pursuing Aug. 4.

A prologue reminiscent of 1960s/’70s article-“Psycho” chillers — in which Mother was commonly the agent of formative psychological scars — has youthful Lindo aka Will (Ian Inigo) at the mercy of his unstable mom (Marlene Forte). Beset by paranoid delusions, she drags him from their tony Souther California household to a motel room, where she approximately strangles him to dying just before regaining sense adequate to dedicate herself to an asylum. He’s left to the treatment of his coldly distanced father (Chris Doubek).

Eighteen years later, Villa’s now 30-12 months-previous Will is a potter, whichever lingering PTSD issues in ample handle that he can relaxed a co-worker’s (Yumarie Morales) nervousness assault, as properly as set up with their insufferable gallery-operator boss (Madeline Zima). He’s also received a fantastic thing going with Luke (Devon Graye), the boyfriend of eight months that he’s living with. But the past rears its hideous head when Mom, incommunicado for a decade, commences deluging him with crackpot phone messages and weird packages he attempts to disregard.

It can’t be coincidental that he soon starts enduring dizzy spells, disturbing visions, office mishaps, nausea and additional. A line of consulted healthcare and psychiatric professionals, performed in superciliously off-kilter manner by various acquainted faces (like Paget Brewster and Adam Busch), assure him it’s absolutely nothing to fear about. Nevertheless issues get even worse, specifically after he would make the baffling conclusion to get some psychedelic mushrooms Ma had thoughtfully mailed.

That bad trip revives the extended-dormant personal specter of a guy-wolf with glowing eyes that terrorizes him, even as it turns into apparent it is no “real” supernatural menace but a figment of his tormented unconscious. Such hallucinations promptly endanger Will’s task, partnership and health, as nicely as (probably) all those all around him.

“Hypochondriac” — a title that appears to be considerably irrelevant, exterior the sequences in which many physicians and shrinks belittle our hero’s signs — has a sophisticated agenda only partly articulated in Heimann’s script, though maybe a bit around-articulated in his pretty chaotic direction. Visible ways in this article incorporate a 360-diploma digicam pan, superimpositions, on-display screen textual content graphics, heightened shade, blurred, distorted and Rorschach-like mirrored photographs, et al. The intent is to evoke a dislocating, nightmarish temper. Far too typically, however, it feels extra like a frenetic get-bag of sampled approaches.

It does not enable, possibly, that the filmmaking is extremely showy even ahead of Will loses his grip: He’s introduced as an grownup in an aggravating tunes-video clip-kind scene of dancing in the pottery studio, adopted by an excuse for improv rap and beatboxing. Villa (who played Richard Ramirez on “American Horror Story”) is duly ingratiating. But the seriousness of the film’s choose on psychological disease would have significantly benefited from his staying on a shorter leash when it will come to inventing adorable actorly bits of business, typically in scenes with the sympathetic Graye. When he’s not being puppyish, he’s managing the gamut of hysteria. So normally likely above the leading for influence, pretty couple of times listed here are as strong as 1 lengthy static shot in which the two male sales opportunities have a painfully sincere separation dialogue.

Certainly, for all the audio and fury expended on illustrating Will’s mental disarray, we under no circumstances get a great deal of a diagnostic grip on it. Subsidiary figures are mainly caricatured, giving even a lot less terra firma from which to have an understanding of his plight. When the movie ends with a sense of acceptance and at least partial recovery, there is much more feeling of getting been on “a ride” than certainty of just what he’s recognized, or is semi-recovered from. Provided that “Hypochondriac” is generally an expressionistic portrait of psychological unwell-health and fitness rather than a genre film (irrespective of all flirting with horror and thriller factors), that lack is a significant flaw.

Nevertheless, its style and subject matter make a difference are bold-enough possibilities to impress, specially inside in the oft-formulaic context of recent LGBTQ cinema. Even though not each and every plan right here will work, a resourceful tech and style and design bundle led by Dustin Supencheck’s widescreen cinematography places its finest foot ahead in provider of Heimann’s vision.