Maybe the cutest, smartest girl in school figures into that. His parents are in contact with the shrink he’s always talking to (whom we never see or hear). But she’ll be watching for signs he’s losing it.

Only headmistress Sister Catherine ( Beth Grant) is in on Adam’s secret. Yeah, “stepdad” is a little worried about the kid having access to knives. Stressed but eternally hopeful Mom ( Molly Parker) and the new man in her life ( Walton Goggins, playing with our expectations, cast against “type”) get “treatment resistant” Adam into a Catholic School and onto an experimental new drug.Įverybody, even a reluctant Adam, is all-in on a last chance senior year, drugged up so that he can get through the day, desperate to graduate so that he can go to culinary school in the fall. But “Words on Bathroom Walls” never lets us forget the “Good Will Hunting moment” in such a life, under such mental pressure, is terrifying. This may be a lightweight primer on learning about your illness, struggling with school and family and yet finding love in the middle of all this. Yeah, all that falls under “cute.” But director Thor Fredenthal (A “Percy Jackson,” a “Wimpy Kid”) and Plummer do a splendid job of maintaining the tension that someone barely clinging to his sanity lives under.

AnnaSophia Robb becomes his blonde, romantic ideal, airy fairy sensitive, a dancing hippy vision (“Dalai Lama meets Coachella”) in his hallucinations.

A raging libido shows up in the bathrobe and underwear clad stoner Lothario ( Devon Bostick) full of advice to the hormonal.Īnd then there’s the real person from the school he’s kicked out of in the film’s opening scenes. He has gang-banger “body guards” (led by Lobo Sebastian, good) in track suits, wielding baseball bats in his mental defense. His mental safety net is a further manifestation of his condition. But the Golden Rule of Cinema is “Show us, don’t tell us” and in the name of all that’s holy, don’t narrate our ears off.īut the madness that descends upon Adam, winsomely played by Charlie Plummer ( “All the Money in the World”) would terrify anyone - swirling inky black smoke covering his surroundings, black bile oozing down windows, chem lab class turning into gravity-defying chaos, and every open door an opportunity for The Voice of Your Doom calling to Adam. Maybe that suits someone who’s living and struggling far too much inside his own head. The film is annoyingly burdened with far too much voice over narration. Yes, this adaptation of Julia Walton’s YA novel is a warm and fuzzy teen romance, and yes, some of the manifestations of the hero’s illness have more than a hint of “cute” about them. I don’t know anyone diagnosed with schizophrenia, but if it’s anything like its visualization in “Words on Bathroom Walls,” it is the quintessence of terror.

Julia walton words on bathroom walls