Chris Duncan
What is OCD? Obsessive-compulsive Disorder is a mental illness that most people recognize by name, but don’t really know anything about. That is the utility that Pure O aspires to, at least in part: clarifying misconceptions about this condition we know so little about culturally. Pure O‘s goal is to depict what OCD is, what it isn’t, and what effect it can have on someone’s life. The journey it presents is appropriately awkward and uncomfortable as its leading man confronts his mental illness. In that way the film is commendable for showing just how difficult, tense, and alienating the experience of dealing with mental illness can be.
Pure O is written and directed by Dillon Tucker and stars Daniel Dorr as Cooper, a counselor at a rehab facility and aspiring screenwriter who begins reckoning with the fact that he has Obsessive Compulsive Disorder in a form known as “Pure Obsessive,” or Pure O. Specifically, his intrusive thoughts about hurting people, particularly his loved ones, trouble him all the time. His mental health journey is, predictably, full of uncomfortable truths and adjustments, and he deals not just with his condition, but how he communicates his complicated thoughts with his fiancée (Hope Lauren). He also navigates work at the rehab and his bond with a young girl named Rachel who is a recovering addict (Landry Bender). It is, notably, inspired by the filmmaker’s own experience.
Right from the beginning, the film drops the viewer into the middle of Cooper’s process, voicing his fears and anxieties about his strange urge to hurt his loved ones. We see a brief flash of the knife he holds in his hand as he sits in his car, and then we’re immediately transported to the start, and forced to wonder how we eventually get to that point. The context we eventually gain, then, is certainly not light, but much less ominous than what we’re initially led to infer. It’s a clever sleight of hand, then, that Pure O pulls with this, and it speaks to the film’s core message. Mental illness is difficult to deal with, and forces people into situations that might alienate their loved ones, but if we seek to understand the context of their lives, then we can more effectively help those people whom we care about.
Overall, Pure O aims to be a poignant story about how one should not allow whatever figurative baggage they carry to limit them. It clearly aspires to the kind of quintessentially millennial mumblecore films on which figures like Joe Swanberg or Greta Gerwig cut their teeth. It doesn’t reach those heights but instead meanders without clear direction for most of its runtime. Cooper goes to work, he goes to therapy, he spends time with his fiancée, he deals with family issues. Rinse and repeat.
Autobiographical films like Pure O need perspective. When the ability to think and thus write from another person’s point of view is limited, the film is then limited as well. Characters become defined only by their relationship to the film’s protagonist. The film, then, ends up building an entire world that revolves around the character of Cooper—a conceit that is simply not as compelling externally as it is internally, to Cooper himself. Characters are limited in what they can do if they can only move or change based on how Cooper moves or changes. And if Cooper does not move or change, at least not in an interesting way, where does that leave the film?
Pure O presents an honest portrayal of mental health issues and recovery. Cooper isn’t without flaws—for one, he fantasizes about killing his girlfriend, which is the whole impetus of the movie! He also meets plenty of other people also dealing with strange, difficult issues, which broadens his own perspective. Mental health is strange and prickly, and Pure O wants the viewer to understand where the people most struggling are coming from.
Pure O is at its best when it is showing the most interesting part of any reckoning with mental illness: that is, the experience of learning about the self, both by oneself and with the help of others. Instead of giving that experience its due diligence, though, Pure O is more concerned with how that illness affects everything around Cooper. But in making its whole world revolve around Cooper, the film makes it feel like Cooper is the one character who can’t change.
