I had very little idea of what to expect going into The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, but it's fair to say that any expectations were firmly shattered. This was a beautifully acted, directed, designed, and paced movie. The cast were phenomenal – Claire Foy in particular! Her reaction to the diagnosis – stunned silence, followed by a short chuckle and a deadpan "Just when I was starting to enjoy it" – wrecked me, and the film just kept laying on those punches. Honestly, "emotional whiplash" is probably the single most accurate explanation of what the movie feels like. What starts as a whimsical, entrancing oddball of a film takes an immensely, heart-wrenchingly sad twist, and then slowly slides into a darkness that is, in hindsight, hinted at, but still continues to surprise. Death after death; tragedy after tragedy; moments with even the most sidelined characters that are poignant and weighty (his boss' somber turn in the restaurant when he's simultaneoulsy laying him off and telling him that he needs to spend time with his wife – good lord! 😟). And yet, even through it all, there are moments of joy and intrigue and hope. And cats. Lots of cats.
The first thing I did once the credits rolled was to look up what was true and what was embellished. (Well, no, the first thing I did was stare into space for fifteen minutes and just try to process what had just happened, but after that I did some searching around the web.) The remarkable thing is that it's basically all true. They tweaked a couple of the side plots, to simplify things. For instance, the man who recognises him in the asylum has been recast, and there's no evidence that they had ever met before, but he was recognised by a fan in the asylum during an inspection, and this did lead to a national campaign to raise money for better care, supported by both the Prime Minister of the day and H. G. Wells 🤯 But the key plot points – his wife, her death, Peter the cat, his sister's condition, his time in America, his fame, and lack of copyright – it's all real. The director famously said in an interview that the more they read of his life, the more embellishment they removed from the script.
And those paintings! I recognised many of his earlier pieces – which is wild! – but the psychedelic cats and kaleidoscope cats that he ends his life making, they're incredible, and somehow the film doesn't actually do them justice. They're even weirder and more abstract in real life!
The director is also on the record as saying that they didn't want to retroactively diagnose Louis, even though he was clearly suffering from some level of mental health crisis throughout his life. I think that was also the right idea. There's something somewhat more intimate and timely simply having no idea quite what is going on, so playing it very loose keeps that as confusing as it would have been for the real person (at least, that's an interpretation). It also gives more artistic license for how to show the effects of his "mania", which range widely throughout the story. Easily my favourite are the "electric moments of nature" when everything seems to fade in and out of an oil painting – completely stunning!
Which is all to say that I loved this film and have almost nothing bad to say about it.