Our culture has come a long way since One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. While the Jack Nicholson film is indeed a great one, it is nowhere near an accurate picture of what mental illness and treatment look like today.
This list compiles the best films that authentically portray psychiatric disorders. Please note that although the actors in many of these films are precise in their portrayal of mental illness, the characters, for the most part, are not always treated with medical efficacy. Of course not. This is Hollywood and Hollywood films need drama. Fair warning: Spoilers ahead.
1. Silver Linings Playbook (2012)
In his breakout dramatic role, Bradley Cooper plays a bipolar high school teacher who, upon suffering a violent nervous breakdown, is sent to a mental hospital. The film begins as he is released from treatment and goes to live with his parents in Philadelphia.
In the most accurate portrayal of mania on screen in my opinion, Cooper’s Pat stays up all night bingeing on Ernest Hemingway books, then busting in on his parents’ bedroom at 4AM to yell out theories about the characters in A Farewell to Arms. He also meets and falls in love with Tiffany, a widow with borderline personality disorder, masterfully portrayed by Jennifer Lawrence.
2. Donnie Darko (2001)
Jake Gyllenhaal’s turn as a schizophrenic teenager in the 1980s is brilliant in this captivating film that also features a stellar soundtrack.
Titular character Donnie hallucinates a man-size bunny rabbit who tells him mischievous deeds to do. Donnie floods the school, breaking the water main with an axe and also burns down the house of a local motivational speaker – played by Patrick Swayze – who turns out to be a pedophile. What transpires is true dynamite filmmaking.
3. Black Swan (2010)
This psychological thriller features a perfectionist professional ballet dancer played by Natalie Portman. From a mental health standpoint, this one has it all: dissociative identity disorder (a.k.a., multiple personality disorder), schizophrenia, OCD, and an eating disorder. Portman won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of this multifaceted mentally ill character.
4. Rain Man (1988)
Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise star in this unlikely buddy movie with a twist of mental illness. Hoffman plays Raymond, the socially challenged autistic savant who errs on the genius side of the intelligence spectrum. He is a mental calculator, as revealed when a Raymond counts exactly how many toothpicks are dropped by a diner waitress.
Raymond’s younger, yuppie brother, Charlie (Cruise) sets out to befriend the long-lost sibling he never knew existed. Why? Because his estranged father died and left his multi-million dollar estate to his brother Raymond.
Hoffman’s authentic performance won the film Oscars for Best Actor and Best Picture.
5. Melancholia (2011)
Indie director Lars Von Trier (Dancer in the Dark, Nymphomaniac) paints a sharp and lifelike picture of depression in this art film starring Kirsten Dunst (Justine), Charlotte Gainsbourg (Claire), Kiefer Sutherland, and Alexander Skaarsgard. The film is mostly about a planet called Melancholia that is poised to crash into Earth and the lives of two sisters in a wealthy family.
Melancholia is a product of Von Trier’s “Depression Trilogy,” with Antichrist preceding it and Nymphomaniac following. The inspiration for the film came from a major depressive episode Von Trier suffered himself.
Kirsten Dunst nails her portrayal of the depressed Justine ,for which she won Best Actress at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. In several scenes, she looks disheveled and is depicted staring blankly out the window. She sleeps day and night. She is seen needing help getting into the bathtub. When her sister Claire cooks her favorite dinner –meatloaf – Justine takes one bite and declares, “This tastes like ashes.” She cries hysterically at the dinner table. Von Trier captures what depression feels like more than any other film I can think of.
6. A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Stanley Kubrick’s classic is unique in that it is equally good as Anthony Burgess’ novel. The look and feel of the Oscar-nominated film is timeless.
The story follows the escapades of Alex and his three “droogs” (Orange-speak for “pals) as they commit various acts of what he calls “ultra-violence.” Alex exhibits antisocial personality disorder to the extreme. The word psychopath gets thrown around a lot, but Alex is emblematic of the term.
Alex is extremely passionate about classical music, which provides the soundtrack to which he rapes, brutalizes, and murders. His crimes find him sentenced to 14 years in prison, where he undergoes a sick form of brainwashing.
Alex is the very definition of the antihero narrative in literature. Oftentimes difficult to watch, A Clockwork Orange is well worth your while.
7. What About Bob? (1991)
Bill Murray stars in this comedy about a man with generalized anxiety disorder whose psychiatrist, Dr. Marvin (played by real-life bipolar sufferer Richard Dreyfuss), is a published author renowned for advocating patients to take “baby steps” towards their goals of recovery.
Bob tracks his doctor to his vacation home in New Hampshire, where he befriends the doc’s family while staying with a couple at another residence. Bob overcomes his many phobias, while driving Dr. Marvin absolutely nuts. It’s a now-classic stroke of comedic genius.
8. Born on the Fourth of July (1989)
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) wasn’t an illness that was recognized by the psychiatric community until 1980, but it is on full display here in Born on the Fourth of July, an Oliver Stone film based on Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic’s autobiography.
Tom Cruise plays the all-American protagonist who enlists in the Marines and goes on two tours of duty in Vietnam. The source of Kovic’s PTSD is a series of events in which his Marine unit kills a number of Vietnamese villagers, believing them to be enemy combatants. In a daze, Kovic accidentally shoots and kills one of his fellow soldiers as well.
Wounded on another tour of duty a few years later, Kovic is left paralyzed from the chest down. After a stint in the VA hospital – wheelchair bound – he returns home to his parents’ house only to be haunted by flashbacks and eventually succumbs to alcoholism. And feels flashbacks when firecrackers go off at a Fourth of July parade. Giving a speech, a baby begins to cry and Kovic freaks out, immediately reminded of a baby crying in the village in Vietnam.
It’s a vivid portrait of PTSD, which is also portrayed in films such as The Hurt Locker, The Deer Hunter and Ordinary People.
9. The King’s Speech (2010)
Social anxiety is on full display as Colin Firth plays the massively stuttering King George VI of England, who employs the help of a speech therapist (Geoffrey Rush) in order to prepare for his first wartime radio broadcast about Great Britain’s 1939 declaration of war on Germany.
The story of the stutter and how he overcame it was a hit with the Academy. This movie won Best Picture at the 2011 Oscars and Firth won for Best Actor.
10. A Beautiful Mind (2001)
Russell Crowe plays the role of John Nash in this true story of a mathematician gone mad. Nash is the toast of academia after he pens an article on “game theory,” inventing a new concept that would be coined the Nash equilibrium.
In the thick of the Cold War, Nash is given an assignment with the U.S. Department of Defense to encrypt enemy communications. His mental health soon deteriorates as he starts hallucinating the existence of Soviet spies in his everyday. These are signs of paranoid schizophrenia, a diagnosis which he receives when admitted to a psychiatric hospital.
The film won Best Picture at the Academy Awards in 2002.
