Shock Head Soul

Daniel Paul Schreber was a successful lawyer who suddenly began to receive messages from God via a ‘Writing Down Machine’. He spent the next 9 years confined to an asylum tortured by delusions of cosmic control, suffering the belief that the only way to save the world is to subject himself to God’s will and change his gender. During his hospitalization in 1903, he wrote and published Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, one of the few treatments of mental illness ‘from the inside’. In the 1940s and 50s, Schreber’s book, an authentic voice from the abyss of madness, became the art-brut movement’s bible. In a cinematic study of psychosis, Shock Head Soul interleaves the story of Schreber’s mental illness, fragments of his book with CGI animation and documentary interviews with contemporary psychiatrists. Brit experimental director Simon Pummell's study of mental illness and its treatment at the turn of the 20^th century, has all the weirdness, cerebral depth and envelope-pushing style that David Cronenberg's otherwise estimable Jung-Freud faceoff, ‘A Dangerous Method’, lacks, wrote ‘Variety’s critic, Leslie Felperin.