Memoirs of My Nervous Illness Reviews

Julian P. Hobbs's Memories of My Nervous Illness seems to resonate from inside a tin can.

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The psychobabble makes for dry filmmaking until [subject Daniel Paul] Schreber starts going fem. From that point on, it's every man for himself.

| Original Score: 2/4

Memoirs of My Nervous Illness is an accomplished and stylistically audacious effort that all too accurately conveys the confusion and mental disarray of its subject's illness, ultimately to its detriment.

[Jefferson] Mays throws himself into the role of a man who attempts to transform into a woman, but his efforts feel like futile flailings: The actor -- and his character -- are so much bigger than any story we're allowed to see.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

Director-writer Hobbs, making his feature debut, walks the lip of the campy abyss in this deliberately theatrical rendering of the disturbed mind.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4

Hobbs' inspired feature sticks close to real-life texts, retaining Schreber's disconcerting mix of Teutonic clarity and schizophrenic imaginings.

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The American actor Jefferson Mays is back in rouge and petticoats for Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, a punctilious account of madness and womb envy.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5

indulgent and erudite in a way that only an art film can be

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5

A brave and bewildering screen adaptation of a German judge's infamous, proto-Freudian account of his mental breakdown.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

Hayes' remarkable portrayal calls forth the madman from the text and, eventually, the human being from the madman.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

Under the welter of all this heavy aestheticism, some of the performers are somewhat stymied, but thankfully not Mays.

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