A film that manages to be heart wrenching, hilarious, and ass-clenchingly scary in equal measure, Addison Heimann’s HYPOCHONDRIAC is a full body experience of a movie that you will not want to miss. It begins in a way that dares you to keep watching, asking if you can hang as we meet our lead, Will on a day as a young boy where his mother (Marlene Forte) tried to kill him in the midst of a paranoid delusion. Bleak and heavy, this opening demonstrates one of the great strengths of HYPOCHONDRIAC—its ability to fully immerse the viewer in the feeling of a specific moment. That feeling quickly shifts to one of pure elation when we are reintroduced to Will (Zach Villa) in present day, dancing with reckless abandon around the studio where he works as a potter. The decision to include Jessie J’s “Domino” in this moment was nothing short of genius because the second that those first notes played, HYPOCHONDRIAC had fully won me over and I was eating out of the palm of its hand until the credits rolled.
Zach Villa is phenomenal as Will, the aching, beating heart of HYPOCHONDRIAC. He makes the character so real and so alive that you are rooting for him as soon as you meet him. We get to witness the life he has built for himself, doing work that he loves even if it’s at a job he may hate, caring for his friends, and being in a loving relationship with his boyfriend Luke (Devon Graye). He seems to have everything we could have hoped for the suffering boy we met in the film’s introduction, until he begins receiving cryptic packages from his mother who he has not seen in over a decade. These packages include messages via tape recorder telling him not to trust Luke, which is alarming for a number of reasons, one of them being that Luke believes Will’s mother died when he was a child. This facade becomes more and more difficult for Will to maintain as his mother’s attempts to contact him become increasingly frequent.
It is understandable why Will would tell this lie to Luke, his relationship with his mother being deeply personal and conflicting for him. It is also a deep well of fear. The fear that he’ll end up like his mom, the fear of the things he cannot control or escape, the fear that Luke will always look at him a little bit differently once he knows every part of him. HYPOCHONDRIAC dives into and picks apart these fears while also fully immersing its audience within them, creating a viewing experience that is as scary as it is thoughtful. The jumpscares sprinkled throughout are executed so well and with such purpose that it’s maddening. One scare is so effective that I all but shit myself, instinctively pausing the movie to gather my courage again before pressing play.
Beyond big, loud jumpscares however, HYPOCHONDRIAC is also scary in a much more insidious, bone chilling way. As Will becomes increasingly affected by his mother’s attempts to reach him, his anxieties manifest physically through an injury at work, as well as psychologically through various hallucinations, including the appearance of a terrifying wolf-like figure taunting him at every turn. The hallucination scenes are heart pounding to experience. With images swirling, blurring, and mirroring across the screen, and masterful sound design by Steven Avila, the sensation is so overwhelming that it completely locks the viewer in, preventing your mind from wandering to any place other than what is happening before you. This feeling ramps up more and more until it becomes unbearable, planting us firmly in the moment with Will, searching for any escape. Because we are able to feel the weight of Will’s situation so fully, we are also able to feel how insulting it is when various medical professionals dismiss his symptoms as “just stress.”
Additionally, we feel the profound impact it has when Luke, someone who loves and cares for Will, wants to connect with every part of him and wants to share this burden with him, despite Will’s every attempt to keep him out. Queerness has been woven into the fabric of horror since the genre began, and the explicit queerness of HYPOCHONDRIAC is another one of its great strengths. The movie deals with fears and anxieties that are universal, but specific and heightened for gay people. The fear of being unapologetically yourself or of revealing things about yourself that could be weaponized against you are so much more impactful as a result of HYPOCHONDRIAC being a queer story. It’s poetic and haunting and beautiful to have a gay love story running parallel to a psychological horror as it does here. This all culminates when a scene of profound intimacy morphs into a scene of profound violence and fear, and it feels like an unspeakable betrayal. It is such a punch to the gut, leaving the viewer disoriented and terrified, and this deft emotional shift feels like an apt encapsulation of the movie overall.
HYPOCHONDRIAC pushes the viewer to constantly question everything; what is real, who is real, and what you can believe. Many of the scares throughout the film are delivered in a similarly disorienting way, revealing things in rapid succession, leaving you to piece together what happened while the sights and sounds are still washing over you. In addition to its effective frights, HYPOCHONDRIAC also manages to balance being funny and meaningful and heartfelt in equal measure. It tackles heavy themes that I saw across so many of the films at SXSW this year but brings them together in a way I felt was the most cohesive. Between the fear of asking for help, the fear of letting people in, the fear of revealing too much of yourself, and the relief of allowing yourself to be taken care of, of giving yourself over to someone you trust and love, the film is the emotional equivalent of a triathlon. To be so thought provoking while also being entertaining is a true feat that solidifies HYPOCHONDRIAC as a movie I so look forward to revisiting time and time again.
Tags: Addison Heimann, Devon Graye, Film Festivals, Hypochondriac, LGBTQIA+ horror, Marlene Forte, Mental Health, Mental Illness, Queer Horror, Steven Avila, SXSW, SXSW 2022, Zach Villa
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