Brooklyn Horror 2024 Review: PSYCHONAUT, Love Heals All Wounds

A late night altercation on a dark and stormy night leaves Maxime’s girlfriend Dylan with a life threatening head wound. Given the circumstances surrounding how Dylan got injured Max can’t take her to the hospital so she takes her to Samantha’s house, who might be a black market surgeon for ne'er-do-wells around the city, who also happens to be Max’s mom. Samantha has a futuristic healing machine in her attic but there is a complication. 

 

It cannot heal the wound unless it can map Dylan’s memories and the nature of the injury prevents it from doing that. The machine needs to locate Dylan’s ‘essential memory’ and someone has to go into her mind and find it. Samantha needs to stay outside and watch over Dylan so Max hooks herself up and dives into her girlfriend’s mind, traveling from room to room, from memory to memory. Time is ticking away and Maxine needs to find this memory quickly if she is to save Dylan’s life. 

 

It is said that when you have a near death experience that your life flashes before your eyes. Thijs Meuwese’s new movie, the lo-fi sci-fi love story Psychonaut, speculates, ‘what if someone else were to watch it instead?’.

 

The easiest way to describe Psychonaut to you the reader is to call it an objectively stylized but darker, slimmer companion piece to Michel Gondry’s seminal work, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Except rather than purposely erasing memories to forget someone Max is trying to find the memory that will save her girlfriend. 

 

Visually abundant, Meuwese treats the mind like a contained, compartmentalized space, where each door they go through leads to another memory. He works within the confines of the mind and does not explore what depths of imagination it is capable of. That would take it beyond what the story is meant to be, an intimate love story between two women, then two more women. That makes sense when you watch it. 

 

So, because the story is so deeply intimate there is also a closeness in all the scenes as well. Save for the opening scenes that take place outside Samantha’s home, everything is indoors, from living rooms to broom closets. The film is shot mostly in monochrome with only the color red appearing for emphasis during that time. Red for blood, blood for life. Real and virtual we all understand what red means. 

 

We asked Meuwese about the transitions because once Max enters Dylan’s memory every door opens to not just a room but a brand new scene in another moment in time. You have to agree, this is not your typical layout for a house. The transitions were so good and such an integral part of the storytelling we had to ask about them, how they were done. Meuwese told us that as much as possible they were done practically, “Sometimes a real pan, but usually with a simple cut hidden within a camera-pan… Overall in the movie we tried to do everything practically, even the cracks in the walls were done with video mapping, so projected with a beamer live on set, rather than added digitally”.

 

Thijs Meuwese reunites with one of his regular muses, Julia Batelaan (Molly, Kill Mode, Magistratus: Overtura). They’re joined by Fiona Dourif, of the Chucky Dourifs, who plays her mom Samantha. Yasmin Blake is her girlfriend Dylan, and Lloydd Hamwijk is their real-life and virtual threat, Bogdan. Everyone here is terrific but it is Batelaan who gives a standout performance from under crushing emotional weight. Max is the epicenter of this story about love and reconciliation.

 

Driven by emotional needs and wants the story propels itself from room to room, as time ticks away. Heartfelt moments give reprieve for a short time as Max hits on key moments in her relationship with Dylan, and her mother. Bogdan exists as an intrusive thought, something that gives threat to their relationship but also another reminder that time is ticking away. 

 

When you boil it down Psychonaut is about this: Love heals all wounds. Physical, emotional and spiritual, love heals all wounds. The futuristic medical bed helps, but it was definitely love most of all.