Brain on Fire is a 2018 biographical drama about a young, capable professional who cannot explain her newly erratic behavior.
The true story of reporter Susannah Cahalan is a fascinating, if not terribly worrisome, the young woman at the center of rare medical condition that baffled nearly everyone – including doctors – around her. With Gerard Barrett‘s latest effort, based on Cahalan’s book of her ordeal, we are introduced to the troubling breakdown that left her in a frightful spiral, but the film, despite a solid lead performance, is all too superficial in its investigation of her condition, greatly missing an opportunity to make this a far more profoundly moving experience.
Twenty-four-year-old Susan Cahalan (Chloë Grace Moretz) has her dream job as a young reporter for the New York Post, settling into the big city with new boyfriend Stephen (Thomas Mann), himself a burgeoning musician. She’s doing well in her job, making friends with seasoned investigator Margo (Jenny Slate) and making headway with editor Richard (Tyler Perry). However, she’s been feeling a little strange of late suffering from small headaches, blurred vision, memory lapses, over sleeping … stuff she doesn’t take too seriously until she train wrecks an important interview with a senator. This eventually leads to a seizure and finally a visit to a hospital where doctors put her through a series of rigorous tests but remain unable to figure out what’s wrong, thinking perhaps it’s schizophrenia. This puts her divorced parents Rhona (Carrie-Anne Moss) and Tom (Richard Armitage) into a tailspin of their own, struggling to find out what’s happening and what to do with their daughter.
At about 88-minutes, Brain on Fire is decidedly thin in its development of who Susan is, putting a bulk of the film’s weight on Susan’s numerous increasingly-troubling episodes, most of which occur at work where she soon spirals into a chaotic mess. Admittedly, Moretz does what she can, shifting between bouts of emotional swings and outright drop-to-the-floor spasms, hoping to give Susan’s affliction some depth and meaning. However, the film is never as deeply an engrossing experience as it feel it could be, dutifully clinging to many tropes of the medical malady genre, moving from one scene to the other in an almost obligatory fashion.
There are some genuinely good moments that shine, with good work from Slate as a confused mentor and both Moss and Armitage beefing up the drama when the screenplay allows them. However, Barratt is more interested in the calamity of Susan’s wild swings, focusing a lot of attention on the breakdown, which assuredly has its due place, but the film is weakened by its tepid approach. It’s not until the last fifteen or so minutes when we finally get to meet Dr. Najjar (Navid Negahban, in a terrific performance), who arrives with some turn in the diagnosis, something I wish had been come upon much earlier. His exploration and treatment of Susan are easily the most fascinating of the story and should have been the core pillar of the film.
Brain on Fire condenses much into its short runtime, stripping away what might have been a more gripping examination of its subject. Think of Penny Marshall‘s deeply moving 1990 biographical drama Awakenings, which put the emphasis on the doctor/patient relationship rather than the long set up to what led them together. It’s a little unfair, I know, to compare as such, but it illustrates where Brain on Fire might have been a more compelling film. As it is, we get a straight-forward, textbook movie that offers very little behind the curtain of what was surely a truly harrowing experience.