"Where do people go after you change them?"

A young man runs an ice skating rink with his father, with whom he lives until the sudden death of his parent brings him into contact with Dr. Wallace Fiennes, proponent of extreme lobotomy to treat mental illness. The young man's mother had been treated by him, and now the neurologist needs a collaborator to take photographs/portraits of his patients before and after therapy.

The boy, already traumatized by his mother's absence and his father's stories and oddities, wanders into the psychiatric wards and witnesses the doctor's interventions more interested in manipulating others than in investigating himself and his disorders.

The introverted and taciturn boy, he is in dire need of understanding the world that has turned his mother away from him despite his father telling him that he freely chose not to see his son again.

He meets a woman and then her daughter Susan, also subjected, at the behest of a disturbed and histrionic father, to lobotomy treatment. The boy watches and decides for a final solution to his pain, while cold, static and uncanny shots furrow the empty, disturbing gaze of the patients undergoing the treatment.

If a picture, as Susan's father argues, is not a mountain but simply the representation of it, that is, it is the image, the simulacrum of it, Dr. Fiennes' patients also become the image, a surface without depth, reduced to the removal of that part of Es or rather that large percentage of the unconscious that constitutes the more or less removed identity of each of us.

Loosely inspired by the figure of the neurologist Freeman, Alverson focuses mainly on the doctor's procedure that allowed access to the brains of patients without puncturing the skull, but through the eye sockets. After several experiments on cadavers, unable to find a means of getting past the eye sockets to the brain, he acted with an ice-pick and a hammer. Thus was born the transorbital lobotomy, practicable in seven minutes and inexpensive as it required neither personnel nor operating technique: the patient was put into a state of confusion by electroconvulsive therapy giving electric shocks at regular intervals.

More than two thousand patients underwent the treatment, including Rosemary Kennedy, and the goal was to return harmless and absolutely docile people to their families.

This was the stated mission of the neurologist while exercising power that overrides the wills of others seemed to be his real goal.

Women, in this film, are the favored recipients of this treatment, as was the psycho-physical annihilation of witches in the late Middle Ages.

The boy's ultimate and voluntary choice opens a window, a portrait, a snapshot into a cruel, violent and conforming world.

Traveling into the world into which people go when they have been changed is the ultimate desire, it is the attempt to fill the absence at the cost of self-sacrifice.

From lobotomy to drugs to the homogenizing treatments of a society that assumes diversity and distinctiveness as an extreme enemy to be fought the step was short and the aesthetic treatment of estrangement to which this film subjects us makes it the emblematic and photographic contemporary installation of biological experiences alienated from their own specific, profound, artistic dignity.

True independent cinema with a Magrittian look at reality. Foreign to any winking at the market.

Surprisingly disturbing.

27-Jun-2023 by Beatrice