(courtesy Village Cinemas)
There is a very real gnawing sense when you are caught in the midst of dealing with mental health issues where you wonder if you have any agency in this at all.
Your therapist will say you do, and as a grown-up who makes decisions all the time on a whole host of issues, you rationally know that’s true.
But when you are beset by runaway anxiety or a desperate need to count everything in a bid to be in control of what we know in our hearts is uncontrollable, it can feel in ways that panic, alarm and depress you further that you have absolutely no say in what’s happening to you.
Someone who knows exactly what that feels like is Grace (Teresa Palmer), the lead character in Addition, which is the story of one woman’s very real and hauntingly moving and flirtingly funny quest to wrest back control in the face of mental health struggles that seem to be far stronger than she is.
Based on Toni Jordan’s 2008 book of the same name, Addition is also a charmingly resonant love story, a romcom that is as far from the Hollywood fluff and happiness as you can get.
This is love and attraction way down in the very depths of the trenches, mud-splattered and wounded and broken, beacons of romantic hope burning all over you but seemingly having no lasting effect on your life or what happens to you on a day-to-day basis.
When Grace meets lovely, caring, funny English painter Seamus (Joe Dempsie) at a supermarket when she takes on off his bananas so she has an even 10 – the scene at the checkout is a comic gem, as is the follow-up interaction in the carpark – she is relatively fresh out of inpatient mental healthcare, trying to pick up the pieces of her personal and work life.
While she has a close family – she is particularly close to her niece Larry (Lou Baxter) who, like her aunt, is a talented mathematician – there are fractious moments, especially with her sister Jill (Adrienne Pickering) who alternates between close caring and bitey remarks that indicate a high level of frustration with Grace’s repeated lapses into manic counting episodes and absences from the wider world.
Meeting Seamus is a vibrant light in some considerable dark for Grace who does her best to tamp down her episodes and hide evidence of her mental health struggles so she doesn’t scare a very lovely man who looks to be just the absolute right person for her.
But pretending to be someone you’re not, a very understandable impulse when you first meet someone, takes a heavy toll on Grace who can’t cope with departures from routine or from sudden unexpected emotional pressures which is precisely what Seamus’s arrival in her life, no matter how wonderful, most certainly is.
So Grace has a decision, in the midst of a semi-impromptu weekend away, to tell Seamus everything or to keep hiding her true self away which is not really working in the short-term and can definitely not be sustained longer-term.
What follows must be left to the viewing of this wonderfully nuanced, emotionally real, to an almost brutal but necessary fashion and emotionally intimate film, which never pretends that you can just wish away mental health issues, no matter the prize that lies before you.
Seamus is definitely someone worth healing yourself for, if such a thing is even possible, and if you have ever grappled with mental health issues like this reviewer has, you will know that all the goodwill and hope in the world cannot surmount those voices in your head that tell you you can’t influence anything and that you have to walk away and lose yet another thing to the oppressive dynamic of your life.
In Grace’s case, this takes the form of her seeing Nikola Tesla (Eamon Farren) in her home; she has conversations with him, sleep in the same bed with him – it’s all platonic, thank you, she assures her therapist who simply laughs and says she’s heard worse – and he is an unquestioning companion, someone who gets her because he dealt with the same kind of mental health issues.
Why pick a famous mathematical and scientific prodigy as your imaginary friend for those dark moments when life feels too overwhelming to share with the flesh-and-blood people actually in your life?
Partly because he is a mathematician and she can project her considerable knowledge of mathematics onto him, but also because he “sees” her like no one else does and understands what she’s going through.
Sure, in reality she’s just talking to herself, and Grace knows that, but he isn’t critical, he doesn’t treat her as some weird broken person, and he is the one person she can turn to will simply accept her as she is.
But could Joe be that person too?
That’s the great conflict for Grace at the heart of Addition which neatly folds in a romcom, and a very light, funny and sweet one at that, with some very real observations about what it is like to struggle with your mental health and what might lie at the roof of it.
While Addition ends on a hopeful note, the road to getting there is allowed to be gritty, messy and ill-judged, with the movie eschewing any and all temptations to airbrush away what Grace is going through or to have it all vanish, magically, in the face of the power and glory of love, true love.
Things are allowed to stay real, very real, throughout, and much of what makes Addition such a quiet but powerfully emotionally resonant film to watch is that it balances the often grim reality of Grace’s mental health struggles, which are allowed to exist without criticism or easy fixes with the hope and wonder of meeting just the right person (who gets her which becomes key) and discovering that maybe life, all the good bits that you have longed for, isn’t done with you yet and may lie within reach in ways that you never saw coming.