Delayed Reaction: Horse Girl

Premise: A lonely woman has a psychotic breakdown...or does she?

 

I sure wanted to like this movie. I'm a huge Alison Brie fan who has never understood how she's never risen to being a household name. She cowrote the movie, and I'd like her to be successful as a multi-hyphenate. She cowrote it with the director, Jeff Baena, who specializes in weird high-concept comedies like Life After Beth and The Little Hours. And the cast including, Molly Shannon, Debby Ryan, John Reynolds, Dylan Gelula, and Paul Reiser is pretty great. This was a bit too much of an unexplained bummer though.

 

It's a movie about mental illness that doesn't really dig that deep. It uses Brie's character's mental issues as a tool to write an open-ended story but doesn't really cope with the character's actual struggles. It's a little crass. I think Brie and most of the cast are wonderful in it though. Brie plays the social awkwardness so well. She resists the urge to ever play the mania for laughs, and certain phases of her breakdown are hard to watch. Yet, I had a little trouble with the "how did she get here?" test. I don't really understand how the character lived a life that got her to the beginning of the movie. I wish they fleshed out the effect of her mother's suicide more. Was Brie always this weird or did her mother's suicide cause a mental break? It doesn't help that it's hard to even know how old Brie's character is supposed to be. She's about a decade older than all of her contemporaries in the movie*, although she has always been able to pass for younger. In Horse Girl though, I think there's a big difference between if I'm supposed to see her as later 20s or late 30s. How much has she retreated in life?

 

*Brie was born in 1982, making her about 37 when this was filmed. She dates John Reynolds (Born 1991, age 28). She lives with Debby Ryan (Born 1993, age 26). Ryan is dating Jake Picking (Born 1991, age 28). Even the one character I can be pretty confident she's the same basic age as is Meredith Hanger (Born 1987, age 33), although she's also an actress who tends to play younger.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend