Brie Shines in ‘Horse Girl’

f the sight of Alison Brie actually gets you to stream a film called ‘Horse Girl’ (2020) then you’re in for a series of surprises. Firstly, ‘Horse Girl’ isn’t really about horses and Brie isn’t flaunting her comedic chops in the way of ‘Community’ or ‘Glow’.

Instead the actress affectingly embodies a socially awkward woman named Sarah who works at a craft store, does Zumba, binge watches a paranormal procedural and regularly visits a horse she used to own.

These are the high points of Sarah’s life so when her roommate finds her alone on her birthday and sets Sarah up with a similarly awkward but nice guy, cinematic precedent dictates that we move firmly into offbeat, indie rom-com territory.

We don’t.

Something about Sarah is a little strange – her sleepwalking, her nosebleeds, how difficult it is for her to talk to people her own age. What could be chalked up to severe millennial angst is something darker and this comes to a head after a boozy night in that leaves odd scratches on the wall.

From then on ‘Horse Girl’ evolves into something else entirely. A trippy dive into a life unravelling before our eyes as Sarah rapidly begins to lose touch with reality. As the film is told from Sarah’s perspective, viewers occupy a particularly unsettling position.

We want to believe a protagonist who is clearly mentally ill. We want Sarah’s suspicions of alien abduction, lost time, cloning and time travel to be true so she can happily say “I told you so!”, get the guy and live happily ever after.

But that’s not how mental illness works. Mental illness and psychotic breaks are alienating, irrational and frightening to both the person experiencing them and the people around them who are at a loss as to what they can do to help.

Watching ‘Horse Girl’, we are Sarah and it is confounding, profound and terrifying. Brie, who co-wrote the script alongside director Jeff Baena, does some of her best work as her character slips steadily into a psychosis that is at turns manic, vulnerable, determined and knowing.

‘Horse Girl’ “is really an artistic expression of my own personal fear of having mental illness in my bloodline and the terrifying nature of not being able to trust your own mind,” says Brie during an interview on ‘The View’.

“It was really important to us to make this movie from our character’s perspective so the audience is really going on this journey with her. Hopefully we inspire some empathy towards people who have mental illness.”

Drawing inspiration from her own family and particularly her grandmother, who lived with paranoid schizophrenia, through Sarah, Brie offers a window into a world where social isolation and mental illness result in a lack of support when things start getting seriously out of control.

“I think because my family has this awareness of the mental illness in our bloodline, it’s been destigmatised for us,” says Brie. “We talk very openly about depression and going to therapy and that’s been a really healthy thing for me when I’ve been coping with my own depression.”

Clearly a labour of love meant to foster understanding, ‘Horse Girl’ is a difficult watch that is all red flags, spiralling and dissociation blurring the lines of what is real and what isn’t in a bid to replicate the very real trauma of being mentally ill.

Sadly, offering very little in the way of how to help or hope for the mentally ill, ‘Horse Girl’ is vivid and vicarious, confusing and even a little frustrating but ultimately well-meaning and intriguingly wrought.

‘Horse Girl’ (2020) is now streaming on Netflix.

– martha@namibian.com.na; Martha Mukaiwa on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook; marthamukaiwa.com

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