She’s bright and quick-witted and cynical and she’s drawn to the sensitive and dreamy Adam, despite thinking he’s weird (or perhaps because of that). He meets a girl, Maya (Taylor Russell), the school valedictorian who has a little side hustle going on-she sells tests and essays to her peers (at first Adam thinks she’s selling drugs). He’s part of a new drug trial-the drugs help with the visions, but they also mess with his palate, ruinously-and the terms of his enrollment are that he stay on the drugs, which seems illegal, but what do I know? The new headmistress, a nun (it’s a Catholic school), knows that he’s sick, but his classmates don’t. And ultimately, what Words on Bathroom Walls does, expertly, is humanize schizophrenia, make us care very deeply for Adam (Plummer is excellent), while also showing how scary and traumatizing it can be for both the sick person and those who love him.Īdam, a budding chef, is starting at a new school-after a “nervous breakdown” at this last school, his classmates cruelly began bullying him and calling him “straightjacket” until he was forced to drop out. Needless to say, schizophrenia does not actually manifest in the form of movie-ready sidekicks.īut again, hear me out, Words on Bathroom Walls still manages to work, partly because it’s presented with such heartfelt conviction-and partly because the sidekicks are used sparingly.Īlso, very much to the film’s credit, Adam’s schizophrenia is not “cured” (there is no cure), nor is this one of those films where a mentally ill person throws away his pills because he’s his truest and most creative self when he’s off them (although it flirts with that). And then there’s his bruising, bald-headed Bodyguard (Lobo Sebastian), the only slightly menacing one of the three, who is nonetheless there to protect him. There’s Joaquin (Devon Bostick), a girl-crazy stoner wingman. There’s Rebecca (AnnaSophia Robb), a Coachella-ready flower child, always dispensing words of new age wisdom. In his case, that manifests as not just visions and voices and paranoid delusions, but invisible buddies-seen only by him-that wouldn’t be out of place in a jokey Marvel pic.
Our teenage hero, Adam (Charlie Plummer), has just been diagnosed with schizophrenia. For large chunks of the film, its depiction of mental illness is overly facile, bordering on cutesy. Words on Bathroom Walls shouldn’t have worked.
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