A painful and at times overwhelming personal portrayal resulting in a "narrative structure" for a patient to "understand her own journey". A challenge to the nature of reality through the eyes of someone who's reality twisted painfully yet magnificently. This is the story of Lotje Sodderland an energetic young woman who suffered a catastrophic stroke leaving her lost in a mess of colour, confusion, vomit and faeces and had to relearn skills to interpret the world around her.
We take this journey with her largely through iterating over language skills and attempting to match that language back to the real world, but also through a bombardment of colour and noise designed to represent her own confusion and her attempts to reinterpret the new, unfamiliar signals sent by her own brain. Like many of these mental illness documentaries we are spurred forward by self directed footage drowning in personal vulnerability as Lotje desparately tries to explain to us and to herself what has changed without the vocabulary to do so. We are also left with the realisation that the "real world" is little more that own our interpretation of a mess of noise and colour that our own brain reconfigures for us. Given that everyone we interact with has the same form of brain, does that mean we cannot see beyond our own collective consciousness? David Lynch certainly thinks so.
As the movie progresses she takes steps forward and steps backward but at all times her increasingly familiar smiling face and prominent supermodel-esque upperlip beauty spot meet us with resounding positivity and hope. Even in her darkest moments she prefers to express failures with apologies and giggles rather than defeatedness or sorrow. The credits roll over Nina Simone's "Je ne me quitte pas" to remind us that individual resolve may be the primary force between us as individuals and total loss. Thank you Lotje!
7 / 10