There’s a great new wave of LGBTQ+ horror cinema, something which has certainly had precedent throughout the genre as a whole but is only really becoming mainstream recently. There’s a surprising surge of great horror films led by different queer characters recently, including Alone With You, You Are Not My Mother, Knife+Heart, The Perfection, Titane, Swallowed, The Last Thing Mary Saw, The Retreat, and the upcoming Blumhouse slasher They/Them, and the new film Hypochondriac can now be added to that esteemed list.
Written and directed by Addison Heimann, the film is loosely based on his own mental health issues, and is a kind of emotional autobiography (opening with the statement that Hypochondriac is based on a real breakdown). The film stars Zach Villa as the professional potter Will, who begins questioning his sanity after receiving mysterious voice messages and packages from his schizophrenic mother, who once tried to kill him in a brutal opening scene. The mental slides into the physical as real symptoms begin to manifest themselves; whether psychosomatic or not, it’s undeniable that very painful and debilitating things are happening to Will. Heimann, Villa, and co-star Paget Brewster spoke to us about the film.
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Addison Heimann and the Mental Breakdown of Hypochondriac
XYZ Films
People often discuss art as a mechanism of catharsis which can allow for a kind of transference, shifting personal traumas and issues into a creative outlet that may then benefit members of the public who may be suffering from similar issues. Heimann takes it to another level here, using his specific story to detail universal truths, but the filmmaker also learned how to differentiate raw autobiography from entertaining storytelling. “The biggest difficulty is that transition from therapy to an actually interesting movie. Because with the first draft, everybody was like, ‘Addison, this is just your journal,’” Heimann laughs.
He began the script by trying to dramatize his experiences literally. “I lost functioning in my arms for six months after an injury,” Heimann says, “and convinced myself I was dying of ALS thanks to Dr. Google. And my bipolar mother was leaving me voicemails telling me not to trust my friends, and I cracked.” After descending into the American health care industry’s seven layers of hell and navigating a variety of doctors and therapists, Heimann began to find a sense of understanding after a physical therapist had him strengthen his arms by writing, resulting in early drafts of Hypochondriac.
“Something was missing,” he says of the early drafts, “because ultimately, I think what I was doing was using my mental breakdown as almost as a wall to not talk about what I was really trying to talk about, which was my relationship with my mother. That was very much a part of my mental breakdown, but [the early draft] was very much more focused on the injury and what’s happening. But the thing about it, and ultimately why I chose Hypochondriac as a title, is because it starts that way, where he’s trying to solve the symptoms of his underlying disease, but he’s not trying to solve the disease, which is all stemming from his relationship with his mother.” Once that truth was unlocked, Heimann could honor his story, but only with the help of some great actors.
Zach Villa Loses His Mind in Hypochondriac
Zach Villa plays Will, Heimann’s quasi-avatar in Hypochondriac. Will’s relationship with Luke (Devon Graye) is entering into its eighth month, and the emotional vulnerability that requires is something which begins to trigger Will; the fact that Mother’s Day is approaching only exacerbates his breakdown. Will begins to be hunted by a person in a wolf costume (think Frank in Donnie Darko, a favorite film of Heimann’s), or as Heimann says, “the very obvious metaphor of childhood trauma that gets more and more grotesque the more he ignores it.”
Fantasy and reality start to blur for Will, something which is perfectly visualized by Heimann’s direction, which frequently blurs the frame, uses kaleidoscopic imagery, and edits with disorienting dissolves. Villa gives a bold, frequently funny, but extremely open performance here, carrying every scene of the film with some great supporting actors.
Villa (known for American Horror Story: 1984, Good Mourning, Bordertown, and bands like Sorry Kyle) tells us that Hypochondriac was one of the few times he read a script and instantly felt the insatiable drive to take it on. “It was the first time that I’d ever read anything coming through my inbox and was like, ‘This is me. This has to be me,’” he says. While the role is obviously based on Heimann, long conversations between the two found their personalities bleeding together in Will.
Heimann and Villa Blur Together as Will in Hypochondriac
Between COVID protocols, delays, and shooting schedules, Heimann and Villa spent a good amount of time together. “I couldn’t help but to pick up some mannerisms. When you spend time with somebody, you’re going to, by osmosis,” he says. Villa elaborates:
The marriage between fantasy and reality was exactly the key to translation for Heimann, who found a successful way to take something deeply personal and turn it into an exciting, disturbing, but also fun movie like Hypochondriac. The result is a film which lays bare the struggles many people go through with trying to not just get help with mental health, but to actually ask for it. It’s a film which playfully satirizes the medical industry in America while at the same time exposing the complicated psychology of isolation and the cultural responses to it, queerness, depression, and trauma.
There are parts of my life that run parallel to will that I can relate to generally, and some things were more direct than others. There are things in my life that directly inform some of Will’s journey, and Addison and I actually share a lot of commonality in our history […] There are just a lot of elements coming together that really allowed me to pour a lot of myself into the character, and I think that’s honestly some of any actor’s best work, when that marriage happens between fantasy and reality.
Paget Brewster Risks Her Life For Cinema
Disney–ABC Domestic Television
“The whole point of the movie is the journey of how I asked for help, and the idea that the mental illness never leaves you, but you can manage it if you have the right tools,” Heimann says. Paget Brewster, a great actor known for everything from Friends and Criminal Minds to Community and Birdgirl, loved the film (and that specific point of the movie) enough to risk leaving her house at the height of COVID quarantine to film Hypochondriac.
“I thought, Oh God no,” she says, before reading the script. “Middle of the pandemic, first time director, no money, indie film, we’re going to shoot in a warehouse in Santa Clarita — I’m not doing it! And then I started reading it, and it was so good. I was like, ‘Oh, alright, I’ll do it.’” Brewster’s just as funny as Heimann, the two of them having the unique skill of being able to crack quick jokes while also intelligently discerning the heart beneath the humor.
She jokes about it, but it’s true; she took some risks just to lend her star power to a small part, because she really believed in it. “It turned out even better than what I imagined when I read it, so I am so proud to be a part of it.” She plays Will’s therapist, someone who does honestly want to help but is still a part of the medical establishment, and Brewster recognized and responded to that major theme of needing help but not knowing how to ascertain it. She says:
Hypochondriac is Making People Feel Less Alone
Watching Will’s struggles in Hypochondriac will provoke varying reactions, especially if the viewer has first-hand knowledge of mental health issues. It certainly works as a creepy, sometimes funny and snarky character-driven horror film, with excellent direction, cinematography, and music; it also works as an empowering LGBTQ+ movie, with scenes and characters that explore things rarely seen in horror. At its best, though, Hypochondriac works as a truthful testament to painful experiences with mental health, and is an ultimately positive reflection of the struggles many people face. As such, it can be almost as therapeutic for audiences as it was for Heimann.
It’s so difficult to be understood, or not have someone be like, “Dude, you’re fine.” Yeah, that doesn’t help anyone who’s struggling at that moment. Like, you know, “other people have it worse.” That’s not that’s not helping! I think one of the really compelling things about the movie was watching not just his psychological sort of descent, but how the world reacted to it, all the people in his life, and his horror in not being able to stop this thing that’s overtaking him […] I just thought that it was beautifully written, and that’s why I had to do it.
“I think the completion of this movie and my three-year journey have allowed me to unlock more opportunities to explore mental health, but it’s almost like I graduated from the white belt to the yellow belt. Like, I’m nowhere near the black belt,” Heimann laughs. “The acknowledgement that it’s never going away, and that you always have to put in the work, is very humbling to me in a way that makes it seem like we’re not alone.” He concludes:
Audience reactions and a good deal of critical acclaim have certainly seemed to prove this; if that’s not convincing enough, take it from Paget Brewster — “It’s a really unique, important, and provocative movie.” From XYZ Films, and produced by Bay Dariz and John Humber, Hypochondriac will be in theaters on July 29th before coming to On Demand and digital platforms starting Aug. 4th.
I think we suffer in silence, and I was suffering in silence […] We hide ourselves inside our brains for so long because the idea of asking for help makes us feel like burdens. But if we all feel like we’re being burdens, then we’re all going to suffer in silence. I think the whole point of existing is to [continually] rediscover our humanity. Because we lost that in the pandemic, you know, but we turned to stories, and so if I can make people feel less alone, or if we can foster community because of this movie, then ultimately, the three and a half years and the labor of love is completely worth it.
