Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Words on Bathroom Walls’ on Amazon Prime, a YA Dramedy About a Teen Diagnosed With Schizophrenia

The proliferation of YA novel adaptations is hereby officially upgraded from overkill to outright onslaught with Words on Bathroom Walls — now on Amazon Prime — one of eight such things released in 2020 that I’ve endured and/or enjoyed. They’ve ranged from extraordinary character studies (Babyteeth) to funny-poignant tragedies (Spontaneous) to shameless tearjerkers (Clouds) to outright stumbles (Life in a Year). And now this one, which takes author Julia Walton’s book about a boy with schizophrenia who meets a possible soulmate on his rocky path to graduation, and therefore doesn’t guarantee a third-act funeral. Whew?

WORDS ON BATHROOM WALLS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Adam (Charlie Plummer) has three “friends,” but nobody else can see or hear them. Rebecca (AnnaSophia Robb) is a hippie-dippy pollyanna, Joaquin (Devon Bostick) is a horny-teen derivation of a Porky’s character and the Bodyguard (Lobo Sebastian) is a burly tough guy with a baseball bat — and they’re all hallucinations, the voices inside Adam’s head. There’s a fourth entity who isn’t a friend at all, an ethereal black cloud that lurks behind closet doors and gives him all manner of self-destructive non-advice. The kid is a diagnosed schizophrenic who’s burned through one ineffective medication after another. His dad up and left, and his mom, Beth (Molly Parker), is a tough-but-sensitive woman who holds it all together the best she can, even after Adam experiences his first psychotic break during chemistry lab, seriously burns a classmate and gets expelled.

Adam’s in the middle of his senior year, so of course, everything that entails is also coming to a head. It’s a vicious circle: If he doesn’t graduate, he won’t get accepted to culinary school, and cooking is the only therapy that keeps the voices at bay. Beth gets him on an experimental drug and coerces a crabby old nun to let him attend a Catholic school, a jalopy of a plan that nevertheless has a shot at staying on the road. Of course, life will happen to Adam, which is what life unerringly does. Beth’s new boyfriend Paul (Walton Goggins) moves in and tends to hover and scowl and act as if he deserves a say in decisions relating to Adam’s problems; he’s not quite the empathetic type, and hides all the knives from the “crazy” kid. He struggles to keep his grades up, a condition of continuing his attendance. And the new medication not only makes him feel cruddy, but the three goofs inside his head don’t take kindly to it because it makes them disappear.

One other life thing happens, too, and her name is Maya (Taylor Russell). She’s on track to be valedictorian, she’s outgoing, she belongs to enough extracurricular clubs to make Max Fischer look like Jeff Spicoli. She also becomes Adam’s tutor and, soon enough but not soon enough, his kissyface partner. The key component to Adam’s personal precariousness? He keeps his mental illness a secret, and if it seems objectively unhealthy, it’s understandable, because he experienced plenty of bullying and judgment and other cruelties in his previous school. Despite being an atheist, Adam regularly visits confessional, and befriends Father Patrick (Andy Garcia), who’s a calming presence as he struggles through everything at home and at school — you know, Maya asking questions about his odd behavior, the medication making him lose his sense of taste, the standardized tests that’ll keep him enrolled, the crotchy old nun, Paul’s furrowed brow, prom, graduation, his worried mother, those annoying people in his head. It sure seems like something has to give, and we hope it’s not Adam’s sanity.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: It somewhat mirrors The Perks of Being a Wallflower with its mentally ill protagonist, first-person narrative style and new-kid-in-school plot.

Performance Worth Watching: Plummer is strong and Russell is stronger, and they make a more-than-just-cute couple, but the real standout here is Parker, whose warm, assured performance gives the film a vital shot of authenticity.

Memorable Dialogue: “It’s best to say exactly what you mean rather than nothing at all.” — Maya drops some hard wisdom on Adam

Sex and Skin: Just some mild teenage smoochums.

Our Take: Words on Bathroom Walls has noble intentions: It wants to combat the stigma that people with schizophrenia frequently confront. In one key scene, Adam and Maya ride a bus with a “disturbed” man sitting in the back talking to himself, and it’s not just Adam’s possible future staring back at him, but a clear criticism of so many stereotypical depictions of people with mental illness. There are empathetic ways to tell those people’s stories, and this movie is one of them, at least in a broad sense.

And yet, the film’s core gimmick never really works. The three hallucination-characters are glib, goofy cartoons; they’re supposed to be funny I guess, but they come off as try-hard constructs propped up as comic relief for heavy subject matter. They tend to clutter up an already overcomplicated narrative, which boasts the CGI ethereal blackness (a functional enough existential-villain device), underdeveloped father/Father/stepdad issues, a bubbly teen love story and Adam’s direct-address narration framed as discussions with his therapist. It’s a lot, it’s a bit much, it’s a bit too much. Adam and Maya are charming characters, so why not let them banter and explore each other’s minds a bit more?

The film sputters and flows on the fumes of its goodwill and winning lead performances, which manage to endure a climax riddled with a deluge of coming-of-age cliches, including romantic adversities, prom and graduation ceremonies, a big speech in front of a big crowd and other weary crap best left to less ambitious movies. And those only-in-the-movies tropes function to undermine the film’s intent, as if it loses its nerve and waters down the uncertainty of Adam’s situation for a corny happy ending. Earlier in the film, Adam narrates that there’s no cure for his condition; that assertion could function as a metaphor for the truism that problems are never solved, only managed, but the film takes a cleaner, more superficially satisfying tack. This doesn’t necessarily make Words on Bathroom Walls a bad movie, but I do question its wisdom.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Words on Bathroom Walls depicts mental illness in an empathetic light, giving it tangible progressive value. It’s far from perfect, but its heart is in the right place.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Watch Words on Bathroom Walls on Amazon Prime