Delayed Reaction: Delirium

Premise: A man on house arrest, alone, in his recently deceased father's mansion struggles with the ghosts of his past and weak grasp on reality.

 

Compared to the average person, I know a lot about how movies are made, but in actuality, I still barely know a thing. I don't really understand how a movie gets made. I'll hear about raising funds from investors, working out contracts with the actors, taking notes from producers, and securing shooting permits, and it's all abstract to me. I know that a movie comes together and I like or dislike it. At the end of the day, that is the part that matters, but I am aware that often, when I blame the director or writer, I'm really blaming the budget restraints or location scout. Poor casting is often about scheduling conflicts that forced someone to replace someone else at the last minute. I say it as often as I can. I'm amazed that any movie can get made and be good.

 

You can tell where I'm going with this.

 

I did not like Delirium. It didn't work for me at all. It's a movie that uses mental illness as an excuse for disjointed storytelling. The twists are both not earned and too excessive. I can see why they want to have them. I just don't think they knew how hard they would be to pull off. The brother in prison who Topher Grace keeps imagining turning out to be real is an awesome twist in theory. As soon as it's revealed though, all I could do was question the plausibility of the prison escape and wonder how Topher Grace could be so out of it that he couldn't decipher if the brother was real or not. If he was that far on the edge, how was he ever deemed well enough to leave the mental hospital? Then there's the mother being alive and chained up in the hidden basement. That's an awesome visual. The mom looks wicked, but that didn't feel at all earned or make sense. How perfectly contrived. Think about it. For this movie to work, Grace has to be released, the brother has to escape, and the father has to die all at the perfect time for any of this too work.

 

Part of the issue is that Topher Grace is not great for this role. I've liked him in many things, but this is not in his range. His mania plays as much funnier than it's supposed to. He's playing it earnest, but his delivery sounds like there should be quips or jokes in there. I don't think anyone could've pulled this off, but he was strikingly ill-fitting.

 

This was a Hollywood Blacklist script all the way back in 2005. The Blacklist is a yearly list of the top unproduced screenplays floating around Hollywood. Many of the screenplays go on to be some of the best movies of the next couple years. Others...don't. You can often point to how long it takes for them to get made as a quality indicator. Delirium was from the 2005 Blacklist and wasn't released until 2018. If that's all I knew about it, I'd assume this is a movie with problems. Some screenplays just don't transition to screen very well. Stuff looks great on page yet doesn't work on screen. What are some other late releases from that year's list? The Only Living Boy in New York. The Highwaymen. Several others I've never heard of. Maybe the rule should be that if a Blacklist movie isn't produced after a decade, it's retroactively removed from the Blacklist. Because, whatever was appealing about this movie in 2005 was lost by the 2018 release.

 

Verdict: Strongly Don't Recommend