(Written by Intern, Alecia Wilk)
How To Be Normal and the Oddness of the Other Worlds’ title is a mouthful, supported by a feast of vivid storytelling. Adding to the growing microgenre of strobing, manic-depressive, young adult dramas, this cinematic journey follows a tortured protagonist through a plot both bright and opaque. Recently discharged Pia (Luisa-Céline Gaffron) struggles with social reintegration and begins work at her father’s company. Visually juxtaposed against the office, her trouble acclimating is amusing. A neurodivergent perspective highlights the contortionist rituals of conformism, while managing to examine mental illness from more than one subjective. Writer/director Florian Pochlatko does not just blur the lines between the real and surreal in Pia’s point of view, but also explores a wider spectrum of social disturbance to represent mental illness as a latent function of society.
Following fellow inpatient, Till (David Scheid), who perceives himself to be the exploited muse of Björk and P!nk, we first meet Pia. Framed in camcorder confessional style, she speaks to an off-camera therapist about her descent into nothingness. Starting with misplaced keys—the benign kind of crazy that modern life brings out of everyone—she then loses her identity, and is eventually responsible for disappearing the entire universe. A sudden switching lens from the testimonial style to a traditional one captures Pia as she shares that she is no longer an acute case, making her grandiose claims less simple to dismiss. Technical details such as this continue to come to Pia’s defense, even as imagery and events grow more absurdist. Creating an ethos of acceptance towards Pia, Pochlatko refuses to denigrate the delusional.
Despite beginning each day with a generous cocktail of medications, Pia’s funhouse of emotional registry persists. She spends her work days feigning stability and making great effort not to be driven crazy by the senselessness of production. Her plight calls out larger social paradoxes of rational behavior. The mindless duties she manages as “Director of Sustainability” revolve around wastefully printing copies of copies for an industry being driven to obsolescence. Her days are punctuated with vibrant and dreamlike lapses in clarity and consciousness, as loved ones are pushed away and pulled in by the gravity of her unstable behavior. Their patronization only feeds her paranoia, continuing everyone on the downward spiral.
Joining the ranks of 2018’s Maniac, Everything Everywhere All At Once, and I Saw the TV Glow, this story travels alternate, imaginary, and media-made realities to make Pia’s fragmented consciousness legible. All experimental twists withstanding, it resists being overly stylized. A clear out-of-placeness is painted for Pia’s character without sacrificing a realism of setting. Contrasting Pia against the sterility and order she’s meant to assimilate to, Pochlatko’s filmmaking remains cognizant of the real boundaries observed, enforced, and penalized when it comes to relating normally to the world. In a truly metamodern approach, How To Be Normal and the Oddness of the Other Worlds contains both a terribly hopeful personal narrative and a vividly bleak social one.
How To Be Normal and the Oddness of the Other Worlds tests the world’s sanity when it premieres at the 2025 Berlin Film Festival on Sunday, February 16th.
