The Thousands

It’s so refreshing when a visual or performing artist from the art world makes a solid narrative film. More often visual artists end up in a world of ‘art-film’, ‘video installation’, and ‘cross-platform media’, instead of using their skills in more digestible cinema forms.

Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen attacks issues of mental illness head on, with his first feature film Here. The film centres around a well educated middle aged man who suddenly kills his wife. Almost the whole film takes place inside the mental care facility where he is involuntarily held. Nyen based the story on visits he made to a friend that was similarly being held at an insane asylum.

The patients are treated with a ‘videocure’, where they act out their crimes under hypnosis and later analyse the footage. The film’s director also plays a role in the film, as the off-camera interviewer putting together a documentary about the patients. The film isn’t really a ‘mockumentary’, it’s a bit more like Fellini’s Roma – constantly weaving out of the doco form and more conventional film storytelling. Fellini would have been happy with this film – about a filmmaker pretending to make a film about mental patients making films about their crimes.

The characters are interesting, and the pace of the film is slow, but often quietly hypnotic. The line between illusion and reality is blurred, not just for the sake of obscurity. It relates very closely to the minds of the characters, and the confusion of the asylum’s rooms and walls. The sound design is striking – music is only sparsely used – but the sound of nature: trees, wind and the like, becomes deafening. But also beautiful. And that’s how the film draws you in.