![]() It’s a hell of a compelling PowerPoint though. The movie may as well be a PowerPoint presentation at a forensic medical conference. Susannah is so underdeveloped that it almost doesn’t matter who the disease is effecting. When the disease is in full thrall, Brian on Fire becomes marginally more interesting only because the disease is interesting. Tom and Rhona react to him like he’s the doctor from Arrested Development. And finally, in an almost perfect unintentional application of the comedic rule of three, a third doctor finally acknowledges she’s sick but figures it’s all in her head despite multiple seizures. Then the therapist declares her merely stressed. The doctor declares Susannah merely stressed. ![]() Every medical professional introduced is almost a parody of an ignorant, lazy pencil pusher. All of the adults fill the cinematic archetype of “Tough But Fair” with only Perry as her boss bringing a level of real gravitas. The characters around Susannah are inessential at best. Moretz does a solid, technical job expressing these symptoms but the movie has already betrayed her with an underdeveloped character so she becomes just an actor doing overwrought acting exercises on camera. The illness effects her emotions, leading to outbursts of pure joy, fear, and despair. Susannah presents an opportunity to go incredibly broad. Given the events Susannah goes through, however, it’s clear to see what drew Moretz to the role. That’s because Susannah is a remarkably thin characterīrain on Fire features an uncommonly strong cast for a film from little-known Irish writer-director Gerard Barrett. You may have noticed that when describing Susannah as a character in the second and third paragraphs, I mostly just listed the relationships she has with other human beings along with some general characteristics of journalists her age living in New York City. And it’s the only thing in the film that works. The unseen disease is a powerful, compelling adversary. All the while every blood test, observation, and MRI she receives comes back normal. ![]() Susannah’s life begins to fall apart as she’s unable to function at work, then at home, then even at hospitals. It feels like this disease has both Gray’s Anatomy and the DSM-IV open on its lap for inspiration as it throws everything it can find at this unsuspected human being. Over the span of just a few weeks Susannah begins to experience: shortness of breath, exhaustion, numbness in extremities, visual and auditory hallucinations, loss of mental acuity, paranoia, seizures, and more. It attacks her on several fronts with surgical, almost cruel precision. ![]() The unnamed (until the end credits at least) illness that attacks Susannah is a fascinating, terrifyingly thorough monster. ![]() Now I must regretfully un-retire it to point out that not only is the disease that injects Susannah a character in Brain on Fire, it’s also the only one worth caring about. Before it was thoroughly meme-ified the notion that New York was the “fifth character” in Sex and the City was seen as a perfectly legitimate observation. There’s been a long, well-tread critical motif that looks at inanimate objects or concepts in films and television as characters. Susannah is your typical New York working millennial, healthy and happy, until one day she’s no longer healthy. She has solid relationships with her coworker Margo (Jenny Slate), her boss Richard (Tyler Perry), her sort-of boyfriend Stephen (Thomas Mann) and her improbably attractive parents Tom and Rhona ( The Hobbit’s Richard Armitage and our old Canadian friend Carrie-Anne Moss, who we really need to see a lot of more of). ![]()
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