Certain subjects are hard to keep down in the world of documentary. Year after year they resurface, regardless of whether the world really needs another film about the porn industry, mixed martial arts or Kurt Cobain. Most persistent of all is the Inspirational Recovery Story, in which we follow a buoyant character as they rebuild their life in the wake of a tragic incident, often with the aid of music or some kind of alternative therapy. Premiering yesterday as a highly promoted Netflix Original, My Beautiful Broken Brain is the latest entry in that familiar canon, and its overall structure closely follows the formula established by its predecessors, even as its best moments push beyond the genre’s conventions.
Lotje Sodderland was a digital producer at a hip London creative agency when she suffered a stroke that decimated her language skills and threw her sensory perception into disarray. Together with co-director Sophie Robinson, she began documenting her recovery in hundreds of hours of intimate iPhone videos, footage that would ultimately become the bedrock of My Beautiful Broken Brain.
Like many other films about impaired cognition, the documentary attempts to simulate Lotje’s experience of the world for the audience, transplanting her peculiar window on existence to the big screen. In theory, film should be the perfect medium for such a task: just as a melody is easier to hum than describe, sensory matters lend themselves to an art form that’s all about the senses. In practice, though, the further the movie goes in attempting to bring her viewpoint to life, the less it succeeds.
For example, where The Possibilities Are Endless – another recent documentary about stroke recovery – conveyed a sensory journey through metaphor and inference, My Beautiful Broken Brain opts for an achingly literal translation of Sodderland’s descriptions. When she recalls her hearing becoming distorted, the film’s soundtrack becomes busy and reverberant; when she describes seeing flashes of colour, the screen explodes into a wash of purple and pink. The result feels more like a series of Snapchat filters and echoing karaoke effects than a cohesive glimpse into another person’s perception, although it does validate Sodderland’s claim that she experiences the world like a “David Lynch movie”, if you take her to mean the gaudy music videos that have made up the bulk of Lynch’s output since he unofficially retired from film-making a decade ago.
My Beautiful Broken Brain works best when it allows its subject-cum-author to talk plainly about her situation; despite her linguistic impairment, Sodderland is an engaging and illuminating video diarist. It’s these quiet, intimate moments, and not the trailer-friendly VFX showcases surrounding them, that lift the film above a crowded field of like-minded docs.
