I watched A Beautiful Mind on Friday. Though I had heard of the film before, I had no idea who John Nash was and I didn’t know what the film was about. The poster description said “After John Nash, a brilliant but asocial mathematician, accepts secret work in cryptography, his life takes a turn for the nightmarish”. Upon reading the description, I assumed that it would be a spy thriller of some kind, with John’s work leading him into the secret and dangerous world of espionage. I thought of dead drops, car chases, Russians (well, in a way I suppose I wasn’t totally wrong). But the film turned out to be more than that.

The bombshell of the film occurs when it is revealed that John has paranoid schizophrenia. Charles, Marcee, and Parcher (as well as a plot against the United States by the Russians) are all figments of John’s imagination. As Dr. Rosen said in the film: Imagine if you suddenly learned that the people, the places, the moments most important to you were not gone, not dead, but worse, had never been. What kind of hell would that be? The way the film robs the audience of the full understanding of what happening, as we were able to see what John was experiencing, and the revelation that a lot of what we just watched didn’t actually happen was particularly powerful. I found that the film touched upon the complexity of the human mind and found the way the film visually represented what was going on in John’s head to be interesting. I enjoyed the film and would definitely recommend watching it.