Schizophrenia In The Film Voices

Writer’s Statement

In my film ‘Voices’ I use the German Expressionism style to show troubles of mental illness, more specifically schizophrenia. The man has schizophrenia and the movie shows an episode of psychosis that he is enduring. Hallucinations of a fictional son dying and communicating with him occur while he tries to ‘rebuild’ a son. This is caused by the disruption of his mind due to illness. It is shown that the son was never real since there are two main voices speaking to him throughout the film leading the audience to suspect that it is not the voice of his son but in fact just him persuading himself into believing he actually had a son, to begin with. A recurring theme in the movie is the empty bed at the start of the film which

Exaggeration is important to not only entertain the audience but show further meaning and encourage deeper thinking. I used this in my film in the ways that the mental illness is shown, I exaggerated the effects of schizophrenia by making the characters have conversations. One of the scenes in which this was most prominent was when the character was reading a book and he hears someone asking him to play, he says that he is unable at that moment and then a ball which is a figment of his imagination rolls towards him. However, this use of hyperbole was used to assist the audience in understanding the impact of his illness in his life while also having some queries about what else could be possible. I also used this element to show repetition, after many important scenes in the movie where the voices are heard it cuts back to the starting scene of the movie, the pan over the bed, I implemented this to plant an idea in the mind of the audience that there was no one else in the film apart from the man and everything that happened was his representation of it. The empty bed was only ever interacted with by the main character showing isolation and how he had no guidance of