‘The Sadness’, OCD, and The Horrors Of Intrusive Thoughts
Author’s note: This article discusses my own personal experiences with obsessive-compulsive disorder. It is in no way authoritative to anyone’s experience but my own. Every person’s experience with mental illness is different, and their reading of art through their mental illness is just as varied, and in turn, valid.
“What is the most terrible thing you can think of? Why not do it?”
This question is asked in the form of a tagline in a trailer for Rob Jabbaz’s film The Sadness. Chances are, if you are reading this piece, you are familiar with the film’s deserved reputation as a new staple in the canon of shock cinema. The film goes down roads of abhorrent violence and depravity rarely seen in movies made at this level. While the movie will live on for decades for its unflinching depiction of homicidal mania, I will always remember watching and feeling like, for the first time, my personal experiences of mental illness were captured on film.
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The representation of mental illness in film is nothing new. Since the beginning of the form, filmmakers have attempted to depict depression, mania, and schizophrenia to name a few. This depiction can serve both the filmmakers themselves, an outlet to better understand their own experiences, and in turn, can help audiences better understand their own mental illnesses.
Obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD, is commonly depicted in film through characters who are neat freaks, germaphobes, or have palatable ticks or compulsions like knocking on wood, not stepping on cracks in the sidewalk or turning lights on and off. Like any mental illness, OCD has different categories and shades, and while these depictions will certainly ring true to some, they never did for my own personal experiences.
My particular brand of OCD is characterized by intrusive thoughts. Plainly put, at random times, my mind is flooded with horrific thoughts and images, seemingly out of nowhere. In his book “Tormenting Thoughts and Secret Rituals,” psychiatrist Ian Osborn noted that “OCD bears a close relationship” to Tourette’s syndrome. Over and over, these images and thoughts circle around my head. I’ve heard the experience likened to having a song stuck in your head, but replace a catchy tune with images of violence, blasphemy, death, sexual depravity, and everything in between.
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At best, you find the ability to brush these off for what they are: nothing more than a weird thought that appeared in your head. At worst, they can eat you alive from within. “Why did I think that? Am I a bad person for having that thought in my head? Would I ever do that? How do I know I would never do that?” It isn’t the easiest thing to talk about, for there is always an underlying worry of “what would people think if they knew what was going on up in their head?”
Again, the trailer for The Sadness asks “What is the most terrible thing you can think of?” This is the central concept of the movie. A virus mutates, causing those infected to think of the worst thing they could possibly do, and have the compulsion to do it no matter what. At one point, a scientist in the film likens it to someone feeling an insatiable thirst, and drinking themselves to death). Those infected even cry tears as they perform the acts, with the scientist positing that the infected know what they are doing is wrong, and they do it anyway. This idea, in my experience, is the central fear of having intrusive-thought OCD. “I have these thoughts in my head, and what if that’s who I really am?”
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In The Sadness, we are shown the manifestation of that fear. We see people engage in horrific acts of violence and rape, unable to control themselves, acting out every horrific thought in their heads. This depiction is something that I never thought could accurately be portrayed in a film. In my experience, the only work of art that came close was Matt Gilgenbach’s game Neverending Nightmares. The problem with trying to depict intrusive-thought OCD on film is that the images required are so vile, the movie would most likely be written off as merely having “shock value” and potentially careen into parody. But Jabbaz has, whether intentionally or not, concocted the perfect analogy for these experiences of intrusive-thought OCD.
There was a time that I, as someone with intrusive-thought OCD, would avoid a movie like this. For some, films are particularly triggering for intrusive thoughts. It’s very hard to explain, but when I saw A Serbian Film, I nearly had a complete mental breakdown, with new horrific ideas providing fertile ground for my own intrusive thoughts. I remember having similar feelings while watching Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan. All these films have a common thread of characters losing control of their agency and hurting the people around them. I have heard intrusive-thought OCD described, at its core, as a fear of losing one’s sense of identity.
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In the years I have been in therapy and found the right medication dosage, my symptoms have gotten better. However, they still pop up from time to time, because, well, that’s the way the illness works. Part of me was legitimately nervous about seeing The Sadness, given some of my past episodes of OCD flare-ups after watching particularly horrific movies. So it may surprise the reader to hear that in the end, I found the depiction of the virus in The Sadness to be comforting.
One of the worst parts of OCD is the feeling of isolation. The war is being battled inside your head, a place where only you can exist. This idea was explored in Micheal Pementel’s superb article on the OCD reading of Silent Hill 2. For me, one of the most curative moments in dealing with intrusive-thought OCD was learning there were people like me, reading accounts from other people, discussing the horrific thoughts in their head that I was too scared to even put into words. Where I felt isolated, I was suddenly not alone, with a whole group of people who knew what I was going through.
In a sense, purveyors of extreme cinema end up doing the same thing. They put horrific ideas and images into the world, and they are disseminated as entertainment. While I’m sure that will rub some the wrong way, I have found it to have a dulling effect of the stigmatization of even having these ideas running around my head.
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Near the end of The Sadness, one of the characters falls victim to the disease. Before that, she spends the movie being ridiculed by every man she encounters. When the virus takes her over, she happens upon a man who previously chided her, only now she is armed with a bone saw and zero inhibitions to her worst thoughts. Before she acts out these thoughts, she delivers a line that sealed my reading of this film. She states “I always had trouble making friends. I guess I just needed to meet the right people.”
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