Introducing Mania

Introducing MANIA

MANIA is the new feature film from the multi-award-winning team behind LITTLE JOHNNY JEWEL and DREAM TIME. A tense, dark psychological thriller set in New York City and rural Iowa.

Writer/director Jude Rawlins made MANIA because he wanted to explore the symbiotic relationship between narcissism and codependency

Dandy's mother Nora is an overt narcissist. She is grandiose and extroverted, confident and assertive. Her whole life is a performance. She consistently thinks of herself as the most intelligent person in the room. She is incapable of love but uses tough love as her excuse for being uncooperative, selfish, and overbearing. Her exaggerated self-image and high self-esteem actually means that she frequently underestimates other people.

By contrast, Dandy's husband Harris is a covert narcissist. He hides his vicious toxicity behind a veneer of fake humility, attempting to control the narrative through a complex combination of lies and gaslighting. He can fake empathy when it suits him, but truly he has none. He's charming when he needs to be, but he is entirely stimulated by playing games with other people. His toxic sense of superiority is never far from the surface.

Dandy herself is an "exploding doormat" codependent stuck between them. Her sister Ariel has taken her own life, her gentle but also codependent spirit having been crushed by the narcissists in her life. Their father and Nora's husband Norris is a classic "willing victim" codependent, who draws his own self-esteem from being useful to others. He was thus easily enslaved to the likes of Nora.

Dandy is vulnerable and needy, but buried beneath her grief there is an angry and rebellious side to her nature. As the narcissists focus only on exteriors and appearances, they are dangerously unaware of the ticking emotional bomb that Dandy carries within her.

Such extraordinarily complex characters required extraordinarily talented actors to bring them to the screen. Avery Knudson's performance as Dandy is a proverbial hurricane the likes of which is rarely seen in cinema today. As her antagonists Harris and Nora, Rob Merritt and Patricia O'Neil also deliver unforgettable performances that play with fire and fizz with intensity.

STORY

Whilst mourning the recent suicide of her sister, Dandy Fleming becomes infatuated with the psychiatrist Harris Bolger, who promises her a peaceful new life far away from New York and her overbearing mother Nora. But once they relocate to rural Iowa it soon becomes apparent that all is not what it seems in their relationship.

SUBJECT

Mania is a well-researched and, we feel, potentially important film about narcissistic abuse within relationships. The character of Dandy is the textbook codependent "exploding doormat" - the victim who eventually turns the tables on her abusers, who have dangerously underestimated her. By gaslighting her to breaking point, they have inadvertently created the antagonist who will be their undoing.

WATCH LIST

Ten films that influenced Mania

Gaslight (dir. Thorold Dickinson, 1940)
Mississippi Mermaid (dir. François Truffaut, 1969)
Opening Night (dir. John Cassavetes, 1977)
Bunny Lake is Missing (dir. Otto Preminger, 1965)
Repulsion (dir. Roman Polanski, 1965)
The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1971)
Stalker (dir. Andrey Tarkovsky, 1979)
Possession (dir. Andrzej Żuławski, 1981)
White of the Eye (dir. Donald Cammell, 1987)
The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1990)

TRIVIA

The artworks visible in Nora's apartment include a painting by German artist Miriam Vlaming, whose paintings also appeared in Jude Rawlins' first feature film Albion Rising in 2009, as well as a reproduction of Jude's own poster for his first band Angelhead, which he designed in 1987 and which was influenced by the work of British artist Linder Sterling, who is mentioned by name in one scene.

The scene where Dandy has a panic attack in the subway was shot in 14th Street station in Manhattan and is the only scene in any of Jude Rawlins' films to utilize a steadicam. The camera was operated by Rose Gaffney who studied under Garrett Brown, the inventor of the steadicam, famous for his work with Stanley Kubrick.

Mania was the first "conventional" script that Jude Rawlins ever wrote, and was originally set in London and Cornwall in the southwest of England. The part of Nora was written for legendary actress Dame Janet Suzman, but after disagreements with various UK funding institutions, and the logistical problems of getting permits to film in London, Rawlins' shelved the project in 2014. After working with Avery Knudson and Rob Merritt on his film Little Johnny Jewel, he decided to transfer the story to New York and Iowa.

MANIA

Written and directed by Jude Rawlins