Review | Horse Girl provides messy but heartfelt approach to mental illness

I usually stay far away from movies that use psychosis or multiple personality disorder as a plot point. From movies like “Shutter Island” and “Split”, it always felt like lazy writing and disrespectful to people who actually live with those conditions to make a character “crazy” for shock value. That’s why I was so surprised by Netflix’s new original movie, “Horse Girl”. I had no idea what to expect from the movie going in, but found myself moved by it’s messy yet heartfelt approach to making a movie about mental illness. 

In the beginning, I thought it was a story about a well-intentioned social outcast who would possibly find belonging. I was so wrong. Instead, the main character, Sarah, played by Alison Brie who also co-wrote the script, descends into a conspiracy theory laden odyssey that includes alien abductions, possible cloning and time warps. As the events unfolded, I had no idea whether to believe Sarah’s point of view that she had been abducted and experimented on by aliens or the more feasible explanation that she was experiencing psychosis similar to other women in her family. 

Though the movie got extremely strange and nonlinear near the end and I teetered back and forth on what I believed the real story was, I rooted for Sarah regardless. Despite her break with reality, she never fell into the Hollywood stereotype of the crazy mental patient or punchline conspiracy theorist. Brie, who has mentioned in interviews that mental illness runs in her family and the movie was a way of expressing her fears of developing similar symptoms, does a fantastic job of portraying Sarah’s humanity and her isolation from reality in a sympathetic way. 

There are parts in the movie that are hard to watch, and I often found myself covering my eyes out of sheer secondhand embarrassment. As a Netflix original, there are also parts that feel a little rushed, cheesy and low budget — specifically the ending dream-like  sequence. Still, the original storyline and genuine performances make up for it, with Brie’s performance definitely acting as the film’s saving grace. It’s one of those movies that makes people google “Horse Girl ending explained” as the credits roll only to find answers like “decide for yourself”. Though it doesn’t get everything right, it’s refreshing to see a movie that attempts to do something new without using mental illness as an excuse to include a half-assed plot twist or unnecessary violence.