Psychonaut had its world première at Brooklyn Horror FIlm Festival 2024, 23 Oct
The first image from Thijs Meuwese’s Psychonaut is a close-up of the eyeline of Maxime (Julia Batelaan). Her eyes are closed, with the lids wobbling to suggest that she is in REM sleep, and with a set of strange headphones just visible at the screen’s periphery. As a trickle of bright red blood moves down one side of Max’s forehead, the rest of her face is illuminated by shifting neon colours – but as her eyes open, everything changes to black and white. The title appears on screen, stark white on black, with a textual gloss (“A person who explores altered states of consciousness within the human mindscape”) – and then the monochrome continues as we watch Max and her girlfriend Dylan (Yasmin Blake) searching a warehouse crammed with boxes. If this swapping from colour to black and white, coupled with the title, suggests a passage between different realities – or between different states of mind – then this idea is only reinforced by the film’s first, multivalent line, addressed by Dylan to Max: “You’re out of your goddam mind.”
The two lovers are looking for a large stash of cocaine belonging to Dylan’s mercurial dealer Bogdan (Lloydd Hamwijk) – but while they quickly find the bag of drugs, they will in fact spend the rest of the film similarly searching. For once the unstable Bogdan has confronted them, and in a paranoid panic shot one of them in the head before turning the gun on himself, Max rushes to the house of her estranged mother Samantha (Fiona Dourif) with the gravely injured Dylan, hoping to make use of the ‘medpod’ upstairs with which Samantha administers medical treatment to gangsters and criminals at night. With Dylan’s brain damaged by a skull fragment, Samantha proposes that Max hook up to the patient via a new Psycho-Neural Analysation & Uncovering Tool, and enter Dylan’s unravelling unconscious to retrieve the “fundamental memory” from which the medpod can extrapolate and restore the rest of her deteriorating memories.
“You have to stay focused,” Samantha warns Max. “You won’t know the difference between a memory, a dream or reality. So do not linger.” Samantha’s words will prove accurate on multiple levels. For not only is Psychonaut a mad dash through a young woman’s fragmenting psyche, with Bogdan always hot on the girls’ tails shooting down whatever memories they are sharing, but Max’s own memories, haunting her in this headspace like Samantha’s ghostly presence, will become confused with Dylan’s, until it is hard to know who exactly is being put back together in this psychodrama of missed moments and broken relationships.
The walls of the house where Max and Dylan live together are festooned with movie posters whose titles (The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, 1962; A Hole in the Head, 1959; You’ll Like My Mother, 1952) serve as ‘Freudian’ signifiers of an increasingly elusive reality. “The wound is real,” as Samantha has told Max, “focus on that” – and as, in these corridors of the mind, we see Max’s respective bonds with Samantha collapsing and with Dylan blossoming, old traumas bleed into this psychic interiority alongside the fresher injuries. “You can’t run away from trauma,” Max will tell Dylan, “You have to face it”. Yet ultimately this will be a narrative not just of painful confrontations, but of recovery. It is a little like Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), a little like Anthony Scott Burns’ Come True (2020), and a little like Ryan Steven Harris’ Moon Garden (2022): a journey through the folds, recesses and alcoves of a character’s brain, casting distorted light on their inner life, their hopes and fears, regrets and happinesses, even as they are rapidly drifting towards oblivion and death itself. Flitting between dysfunctional drama, noirish romance and lo-fi sci-fi. Psychonaut presents a quest for meaning and love that, while crazily out (or in) there, is also all too human.
strap: Thijs Meuwese’s mindbending sci-fi noir is a journey through a young woman’s brain trauma on a quest for recovery
© Anton Bitel
