Bollywood tends to play it safe when it comes to movie genres. Mental illness, in particular, is a genre producers would steer clear of till a decade ago. Unlike Hollywood, which has produced legendary movies like ‘A Streetcar named Desire’, ‘Jacob’s Ladder’, ‘Rain Man’ and many others. In stark contrast, Bollywood has generally avoided the subject. All that is changing as audiences are becoming more and more discerning, and filmmakers are now making commercial movies on the subject. Corporate Citizen presents the best movies centred on mental health
Astu is a Marathi film, about a renowned scholar of ancient scriptures suffering from Alzheimer’s goes missing from his daughter’s car and the subsequent hunt for him. Astu is not just a movie about an old man suffering from Alzheimer’s. The film is much more than just that. It is a scholar’s struggle to recall his memories, a daughter’s struggle to find her missing father and her recollection of happier times. The movie is a must watch for Mohan Agashe’s nuanced portrayal of the lead character, which is simply spectacular.
The latest movie to be centred on mental illness is the Shahrukh Khan Alia Bhatt starrer Dear Zindagi. Dear Zindagi deals with the widely present but often ignored condition of Clinical Depression. Alia Bhatt is a successful cinematographer, but struggles with coping with day to day activities due to depression. She finds a life coach in the form of psychiatrist Jehangir Khan (SRK) who helps her deal with the root cause of the depression.
One of the greatest films ever made, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest is way ahead of its time. Released in 1975, this Jack Nicholson starrer is has been ranked as the 20th greatest movie of all time by the American Film institute. The movie centers on a criminal who pleads insanity in order to get a lighter prison sentence, and goes to a mental institution where he leads a rebellion against the oppressive nurse who is terrorizing the scared patients. The film was only the second ever win all five major Academy Awards (Best Picture, Actor in Lead Role, Actress in Lead Role, Director, and Screenplay)
A Beuatiful Mind is an autobiographical film on Nobel Prize winning American mathematician John Nash, who despite suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, overcame his illness and went on to make fundamental contributions in the field of game theory, differential geometry, and the study of partial differential equations. Starring Russel Crowe as John Nash, this film is truly inspirational, and went on to win four Oscars in at the 2002 Academic Awards.
This comedy-drama was directed by Shoojit Sircar, and stars Deepika Padukone, Amitabh Bachchan, and Irrfan Khan in lead roles. Although not stated exclusively in the film, Bachchan’s character, Bhashkor, seems to be suffering from hypochondria, which is a mental condition wherein the person, in the absence of any physical illness, believes they must be suffering from some physical illness, often causing them to become unusually alarmed about their health.
By Neeraj Varty
