Girl, Interrupted

Girl, Interrupted follows Susanna Kaysen, a teenager admitted to a Massachusetts psychiatric hospital in the late 1960s for a stay that runs to roughly eighteen months. On the ward she forms an intense bond with Lisa, a defiant long-term patient, while slowly reckoning with why she is there.

The reception was uneven. Several critics judged James Mangold's adaptation a smoothed-down version of Kaysen's memoir that borrows the shape of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest without its charge. Warmth went to the performances: Winona Ryder anchors the film quietly, while Angelina Jolie, who won the Academy Award for the role, drew wide praise for a volatile, magnetic turn.

For a clinician, the film sits usefully within its period. Susanna receives a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, and the picture registers how loosely that label could fall on a young woman in the 1960s. The hospital works as a holding environment, its structure containing what the patients cannot yet hold themselves, and the pull of a charismatic peer shows how a fragile group can organise around one patient's defiance. The question of who is genuinely ill runs throughout.