Home Before Dark (1958)

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jdjudge
Unjustly...nonexistent from history. Simmons OWNS this. 12 years 9 months ago
Siskoid
Home Before Dark is a complex and mature look at mental illness, I was going to say for its day, but no, even now. It perhaps plays even better because we know a lot more about it. Jean Simmons puts in a rich performance as Charlotte, a woman who returns home after an extended stay in a mental institution, to a husband and family who no longer trust her or possibly even love her. There's no question she had a breakdown, but it's essentially impossible to reassert control over her life with everyone gaslighting her or treating her like an invalid or worse, the family's shameful secret. The film is clever. She's in almost every scene, so her building paranoia seems warranted and the other characters slightly unknowable. But Charlotte hasn't been magically cured, and the film understands that mental illness is much more complicated than that, even if the people around her don't. And the more we find out, the more this basic misunderstanding is shown to have made the situation worse. The source of the breakdown is exposed layer by layer, and it's no simple thing. One of the best portraits of mental health issues I've seen on screen, and they managed it in 1958 when I'm pretty sure audiences weren't ready for it. 5 years 4 months ago