Words on Bathroom Walls
LD EntertainmentAfter releasing a series of kid’s films which ended up becoming critical failures, director Thor Freudenthal is back with his most mature film to date. Despite still being directed at a younger demographic, Words on Bathroom Walls attempts to capture a mature and realistic look at the struggle some face with mental illness as it follows a teenager named Adam (Charlie Plummer) who is forced to switch schools halfway through his senior year after being diagnosed with schizophrenia. Where Words on Bathroom Walls does succeed in showing a newfound maturity within director Thor Freudenthal, its cliched screenplay and messy message holds the film back from being something truly special.
First focusing on what the film does right, the visual representations of schizophrenia within Words on Bathroom Walls are quite effective. Where the physical embodiment of the voices within Adam's head being physical actors placed in the world which only Adam and the audience can see might feel a bit cheap and unneeded, the scenes where Adam's world literally falls apart around him are bold enough to get the point across while being well enough crafted to not feel cheesy. Using solid visual effects, anytime a room catches fire or everything within a room starts to fly around in a tornado, the message of the chaos within Adam's head is properly conveyed in an effective manner that truly is able to get the audience to understand and sympathize with the character.
What doesn't translate nearly as well is the main conflict within the film. Adam is introduced as a character who is untreatable, no matter what medicine he tries, his condition remains the same. Where the open invalidation of medicine commonly used to help those with the illness might be questionable, this is an easy enough reason to accept that allows the character to continue and struggle with his condition. Quickly however, as his desperate mother pushes him to continue to seek help Adam finds himself on a new medication which works. The film can't allow the conflict between Adam and his condition to go away however so they frustratingly play around with Adam choosing not to take his medicine which is an extremely frustrating source of conflict. Not only does the film not properly address the issue, but it also doesn't give Adam a proper catalyst to have this issue in the first place. Adam and his family are clearly desperate for help and the idea that the character would rebel against this proven form of help feels unnatural and forced.
Part of this absolutely could be blamed on the performance from Charlie Plummer. The performance given within this film is unrecognizable when compared to the promise the young actor had in projects like Lean on Pete and All the Money in the World, both of which showed his emotional control and power. Here, Plummer's performance feels cringey and forced as he attempts to blend charisma with desperation turning in a true mess of a performance. Where Plummer can and should be looked at when it comes to these failures, equal if not greater blame should be put on the screenwriter. Nick Naveda is relevantly new to screenwriting and it shows as the character of Adam is given truly terrible dialogue to express himself with in scenes that automatically feel cheap and forced such as him speaking to a therapist which the audience is given the first person perspective of. It is entirely possible that these issues are more fundamentally rooted within the book of the same name that the film is based on by author Julia Walton, but as an adaptation it needed to translate these ideas better to the screen regardless of the original material.
Words on Bathroom Walls might be a step above the traditional average teen film that fills a space on Netflix or the theatrical slate but being higher than the bottom of the mountain doesn't mean one is anywhere near the summit. With a forced conflict, bad performances, and a truly terrible screenplay, it would be hard to recommend anyone goes out of their way to check the film out as it releases theatrically over the next couple weeks even if there wasn't a global pandemic to add to the reasons to stay home instead of seeking this film out.
