I couldn't get past the first 40 minutes. Even with beers.
Ronald David Laing was a radical - and eminent - psychotherapist who believed that orthodox mental health treatment was equivalent to punishment, like prison, torture or mind control through drugs. A professional with his own demons, he knew of what he spoke and wrote. He wasn't a snake oil salesman and would be the first to say he might have been 'mad' himself.
This film is the story of the psychotherapeutic community he set up in London where controlled LSD trips were part of the treatment. I use the term 'story' loosely. Unfortunately someone decided it should be a kind of fly-on-the-wall docu-drama, and it's a well dramatised series of scenes, but is a crashingly dull, infuriating film.
The plot has no tent-poles, ie the point you start from and the point you expect to end up at with an arc inbetween. The only tension is through wondering, at length, which patient may decide to start waving a knife about. There are plenty to choose from, and really this does a bad disservice to the mentally ill, and Laing's legacy.
The audience is put in the position of the yobbos smashing bottles and taunting the inmates at the doors of Kingsley Hall, and David Tennant does a Gorbals Doctor Who shtick, which doesn't work at all.
Ronald David Laing was a radical - and eminent - psychotherapist who believed that orthodox mental health treatment was equivalent to punishment, like prison, torture or mind control through drugs. A professional with his own demons, he knew of what he spoke and wrote. He wasn't a snake oil salesman and would be the first to say he might have been 'mad' himself.
This film is the story of the psychotherapeutic community he set up in London where controlled LSD trips were part of the treatment. I use the term 'story' loosely. Unfortunately someone decided it should be a kind of fly-on-the-wall docu-drama, and it's a well dramatised series of scenes, but is a crashingly dull, infuriating film.
The plot has no tent-poles, ie the point you start from and the point you expect to end up at with an arc inbetween. The only tension is through wondering, at length, which patient may decide to start waving a knife about. There are plenty to choose from, and really this does a bad disservice to the mentally ill, and Laing's legacy.
The audience is put in the position of the yobbos smashing bottles and taunting the inmates at the doors of Kingsley Hall, and David Tennant does a Gorbals Doctor Who shtick, which doesn't work at all.