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There have been a multitude of movies that have looked at mental illness, from inside and out, but I don't know of any that has romanticized schizophrenia less than this one.

No colorful Blanche Dubois here, with her tag lines like, "I've always depended on the kindness of strangers." No stunningly gorgeous Catherine Deneuve disintegrating along with the rabbit carcasses in her apartment. No appealingly misunderstood Janet Margolin and Kear Dullea who find a way out of the maze through love. No sensational expose of the mental health system as in "The Snake Pit" and "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." Michael Risely is not a tormented genius either, nor does he win a Nobel Prize or leave a legacy of art masterpieces, music, or writing behind. And the love and support of his girl friend, Adrienne Shelley, doesn't save him -- as it wouldn't in real life.

Risley and Shelley are two ordinary people who find their lives struck by lightning. About one percent of the population will go through an episode of schizophrenia, and the ripples spread out from them, encompassing friends and family.

Risley has an ordinary personality and looks rather ordinary, as does his fiancee. He brings her a kitten in a bag full of food and tells her not to get too attached to it because he wants to get it in the pot as soon as possible. His humor is deadpan. And this flattish quality makes it more difficult for everyone, including himself, to recognize the first appearance of paranoid delusions. At first, they're minor. Somebody seems to have rearranged the items on his desk and he warns his puzzled coworkers not to do it again because it's "adolescent." Like the rest of us "normal" folk, he has a job, although it doesn't pay very well. The delusions begin to interfere with his performance at work and he loses his job. In the course of lending him support, his fiancee loses her job as well. This is how it generally works. When you are gravely disabled, you alienate your friends and family and you lose your paycheck. Now you've got money problems on top of everything else. And one of the worst places you can do this is New York City where such secondary institutions as psychiatric services are geared to provide minimally effective, impersonal custodianship under depressingly shabby conditions.

The details of Risley's descent into madness ring depressingly true. Hospitalized, he lies in his bed at night listening to a phone ringing insistently somewhere. And the director provides us with still shots of empty corridors, institutional sinks, and vacant chair seats. Nobody's home. When he tries to walk down the darkened hallway at night, for reasons unclear even to him, he is stopped by a burly black guy (aides and orderlies are disproportionately people of color) who tells him politely but very firmly to get back to his bed.

It's a first-rate script, if you're looking for naturalism. There are weaknesses in the direction -- so many shaky shots with a hand-held camera. Images that fill the screen are too often glaring closeups, making the viewer even less comfortable than he/she needs to be. The story is strong enough as it is. Sometimes when a character is speaking we see only part of his face, a jaw with a telephone receiver in front of it, or half a head, as in a commercial for a brokerage firm. There is little in the way of music, which is okay. The amplified sound track turns the drip of a faucet into a sound filled with foreboding. The lesser roles are well written too. As is usual when someone is spotted standing on the ledge of a tall building, there are people watching from the street yelling at him to go ahead and jump. None of the principal actors deliver performances that call attention to themselves. The level of competence seems to be about the same as in a made-for-TV movie. But the narrative is so strong it carries the picture along. And actually the movie, being realistic, is pretty depressing. Nobody knows what causes schizophrenia. There is clearly some genetic loading, as twin and adoption studies have demonstrated, but there's much more to it than that, because most often if one identical twin "has it," the other does not. Some prenatal or environmental trigger? No one has identified it yet. To make matters as bad as possible, schizophrenics are so wrapped up in their own illnesses that they form no bonds with their fellow sufferers. They don't have the kind of mutual support that most minority groups, like African-Americans or women, can depend on. They're socially bankrupt. A true tragedy.

I really really liked this movie which I saaw at the Nantucket Film Festival. I especially liked the scenes with the hilarious Spalding Gray and Adrienne Shelley (one of my faves of all time!). The director seems to know a lot about mental illness and he unravels the plot like a good Hitchcock suspense film, and it's also beuatifully shot. Highly recommended viewing if you like films that are dark, funny, and a little brutal. (I do!)

Another movie that easily skips below the radar but it's really worth catching. 'Revolution #9', concerns a poor soul that starts to believe an advert he has watched (on tv) is actually real and containing a more sinister message. This desperate schizophrenic man, played with honesty and conviction by michael risley, is pretty intense to say the least but despite the gloomy subject matter never seems depressing. A film where you can really sympathize with each and every character. His poor partner in the film played by the ill-fated Adrienne Shelly, was brutally murdered in real life.

Apart from a denouement that will leave many angry (i.e those who need everything spelt out for them) this acute and heady psychological drama is well worth checking out.

A goofy 20something (Adrienne Shelley) brings home her handsome catch to meet her folks before announcing their engagement. Look for this in the great opening scene; the discussion the boyfriend is having with his girlfiends young brother over the computer as it's a beautiful piece of foreshadowing.

The gist of the premise is simply this; new boyfriend seems everything a gal could want, until he starts showing signs of beligerance and paranoia. Most of this is aimed at a wishy-washy commercial for a new perfume - he thinks there's something sinister in the subliminals. When he starts looking to others for sympathy to his plight in bringing this secret order to world attention, he ends up with social-egg on his face.

Things progress downhill as we watch his mind unfold. Without the usual theatrics associated with this disease-of-the-week formula, this film packs a wallop and one is sucked into the maelstrom that is his altered state of consciousness. A brave indie that doesn't sell itself out for \the-please-love-me school of sundance wannabe commercialism.

Surely this is what low-budget, independent filmmaking in terms of fulfilling its potential is all about. The unique qualities that differentiate film from other dramatic media like stage plays, audio-tapes, live television, etc. are evident in this film in great abundance. I was not at all put off by recurrent multiple visions, time-lapse episodes, color variations, and other visual effects that have annoyed one or two other viewers commenting here. What is truly amazing about the film is how it takes an ensemble of little-known actors and commonplace settings and creates something powerfully dramatic without losing the verité effect of a politically and socially relevant documentary.

As others have said about the subject matter (some seem very familiar with it in clinical terms), it grabs you by the throat and won't let go even after it comes to a rather abrupt end. I, too, have known people with similar mental illnesses, and have found myself in real life playing many of the roles pictured here -- though to varying degrees and with different outcomes. A sensitive viewer may even find himself or herself identifying strongly with one or another of the characters, which is always a measure of great acting and great storytelling. This film ought to be watched from beginning to end in a dark room with no one else present to offer comments, preferably late at night when one is left at the conclusion with no option except to relive the experiences for an hour or so in complete solitude.

This is a movie that comes with no laugh track. 10 of 10.

McCann's "Revolution 9" tells of a man's sanity slipping away as paranoia takes over his life. This inconsequential and somewhat heavy-handed indie takes on the serious matter of mental health earnestly but with only nominal dramatic success coming from players who seem obviously scripted, reacting to cues, and inclined to over state their roles. Furthermore the matter of paranoid psychosis and it effects on everyone involved is so substantial as to make this film's many artistic embellishments more of a camouflaging affectation than a catalyst. This film would have been better if McCann had backed off the Hollywood stylistics and let the stark reality of the subject speak for itself from a place of austerity, slowing down the process of mental erosion while draining some of the color from the work. Nonetheless, this well intentioned drama with an ambiguous and unsatisfying conclusion should have some entertainment value for those into mental health issues. (C)

I watched perhaps 40 minutes of this and while I was vaguely intrigued I just couldn't really connect with it. It's an interesting idea but it's rather slow and the films attempt to give you a sense of the perceptions of a schizophrenic sometimes just seems gimmicky. Maybe you just have to be in the right mood for this one.

Obviously it goes without saying that one of the worst crimes in all of cinema is to be boring. And this one deserves life in prison for that one…not as bad as the electric chair mind you. The acting is not bad at all, it's actually really good. We have the late great Adrienne Shelly who has always been a great asset to any film and Michael Risely is very convincing as a schizophrenic. The problem lies in how the direction and cinematography is handled…it tries very hard to show us the style of a schizo's viewpoint. That's nice and all, but for 90 minutes of this tripe it all seems to be building to something…anything interesting. Instead we get a typically shot indie film that ends on a typical up-in-the-air-for-you-to-decide note that seemed to last for 2+ hours with direction that was better handled for such subject matter on superior films like "Session 9" and "Clean, Shaven" (the latter of which handles the matter of schizophrenia on a much higher and interesting level). Go watch those two films instead of this mess. You'll thank me later.

A taut, edgy psychological drama, brilliantly acted by newcomer Michael Risley and veteran Adrienne Shelly. I know of no other film that so honestly and nakedly depicts mental illness, that takes the viewer inside the excruciatingly painful experience of gradually losing one's grip on reality and forfeiting control of one's life. At the same time, the protagonist's notion that he is the target of a media conspiracy is depicted as merely an exaggerated and distorted version of the overwhelming media saturation and manipulation we all, each and every one of us, experience from day to day. "Take but degree away, untune that string, and hark what discord follows, " said Shakespeare's Ulysses in his play Troilus and Cressida. In this film we sense just how tenuous that string by which we hold onto our sanity, and to everything that matters to us in life, can be.

While the film takes us subjectively, with unnerving close-ups, odd angles, abrupt shifts of focus, into the disorienting experience of its protagonist, it at the same time creates an eerie sense of not only a character increasingly alienated from his world, but of a world of people, objects, even a cityscape themselves sensed as increasingly alien. In holding focus on an object or an image for just a second too long (that is, longer than would be needed to establish that it is the character's bizarre fixation), the unnerving gaze and the sense of the familiar turned suddenly unfamilar feels as if it is our own. In other words, the ordinary world starts to look like something we have never seen or noticed before.

All of this is accomplished by the director with the strength of honest story telling that is the tradmark of his work (Desolation Angels). As stylized and artistically accomplished as the film is, one never senses that it is trying to be self-consciously arty or manipulative for its own sake. It is the story told from the point of view of a man increasingly out of joint in a world itself falling out of joint. So truth, from this perspective, requires that the camera itself be "on tilt."

About the performances one can only admire the intensity and focus brought by Michael Risley to his portrayal of a man going out of focus. We are with him every step of the way, and---and this is I think the trick---our sympathy for him only increases the more off-putting and bizarre his behavior gets. Someone once said you have to be a pretty good skater to play a drunk on skates. Risely navigates this thin ice brilliantly. Adrienne Shelly is also utterly captivating in a very difficult part: the girlfriend who, though utterly powerless to help him, nevertheless tries---not only because she perhaps loves him, but because it is clear that no one else in the world cares or is even concerned. Without ever seeming to give up hope, she senses the situation's desperation, and what is finally at stake. And so, while played as someone vulnerable, even wounded, and tender, she nonetheless brings something of real human strength, even quiet heroism, to the part through her decency and forbearance.

Finally, the film is also, on another level, an indictment of the mental health system and about the cloud that still surrounds mental illness in this country. Legally, there is no way to hold Jackson (Risley's character). And he is too ill to commit himself. And even then, who would pay? Not the insurance companies to be sure. And families for the most part are either financially, emotionally, or socially ill-equipped to cope with the mentally ill. While the film takes the viewer, together with its lead actor, deeper and deeper into the vortex of madness, it nevertheless offers a sobering view of a troubling and grotesque social reality and of affliction that, on more than one level, hits close, too close, to home.

Revolution #9 is not a thriller, it's a gritty, affecting drama that tackles the subject of mental illness head on. Nothing is glamorized here. This is a down and dirty, sometimes blackly comic film that displays genuine talent on the part of writer/director/cinematographer Tim McCann and his extremely strong cast. Disturbing and powerful, it's a film Hollywood would never make - one of the best recent examples of why a vibrant independent film scene is so important.

For hollywood histrionics, see Opie's "A Beautiful Mind. For a low-key, searing and accurate portrait of a schizophrenic drowning in his delusions, see this little film. I saw it at the Telluride Film Festival, and it was one of the best films there. Refreshingly free of scenery chewing for it's own sake, the lead actor has a terrific natural intensity. And the director has the balls to deliver the gut wrenching feel bad ending that is the only one appropriate to this subject matter at this time.

Realistic portrayal of a man's descent into mental illness coupled with sharp media satire. Speaks volumes about our society's over saturation of commercialism and suggestive imagery. Amazing performances flesh out a dark, edgy story that definitely deserves recognition.

I've noticed that most of the comments on this film are from people who are either big fans of independent film or friends of those who have tragically sufferred from the disease portrayed by the film-makers. I am neither, and would like to recommend the film to others who consider themselves more mainstream. Yes, for a variety of reasons I won't go into (I don't want to ruin it) Hollywood might never have made this film. But that doesn't mean it isn't a gripping drama with more internal coherency than many big-budget pictures. The fact that it touches on some political issues is an added bonus to a movie that should, otherwise, appeal to open-minded but otherwise mainstream audience members. If you get a chance, check out this film, you won't regret it.

Revolution #9 is the best movie I have seen all year. I watched it on the big screen in NYC a couple of weeks ago and have not stopped thinking about it, and I have not stopped talking about it. The performances, direction and all round production quality is top notch. This movie, for me, is what A Beautiful Mind SHOULD have been. An honest dark look at mental illness that rings true and is not afraid to be real to the point of discomfort. Kudos to all involved!

I loved this film. I would call Revolution #9 the best indie of the year. The acting is super. Michael Risley performance as a man slipping into mental illness is chilling. Tim McCann's control over the films visuals, performance and editing are stand out. This is a smart film that should be seen!

This is a powerhouse of an independent film, taking risks where bigger more commercial films are afraid to go. It's also worth noting that every single performance in this movie is great. There are no weak actors, even in the smaller roles. The lead actor is also very good. He plays the role of a schizophrenic with thoughtful restraint never once going too far into being a stereotypical 'crazy' person. It was really quite refreshing to see. I saw this film at the Toronto Film Festival and hope it gets the release it deserves.

A movie based on reality, not a Hollywood version of reality. And having experienced dealing with someone who had a mental illness, I can tell you this is the best movie ever made regarding that subject. Excellent emotional painting of a true human tragedy.

The slow meltdown into deep paranoid psychosis was truthfully portrayed. The blooming of new onset schizophrenia was well studied and interpreted by Risely. Interestingly, I felt that there was some similarity to Memento. Great movie.

Tim McCann is a talented director who has an incredible eye for shooting and telling a story. This film is a perfect example of the creative resourcefulness that especially comes from independent filmmaking. This film takes you on a journey and has you leaving the theater with a new perspective on a lot of levels.

Revolution #9 is the one film that finally gets it right! Most people who write about mental illness (MI) seem to develop the screen play and then simply make one of the characters MI, almost as an after-thought. That simply becomes a movie about mental illness; in Revolution #9 we are taken into the head of a person who has schizophrenia, and we are able to see (as first hand as possible) what it would be like. To get a real accurate idea of both sight and sound of the schizophrenic world, go to:

(http://www.npr.org/ramfiles/atc/pharmacy/20020829.atc.pharmacy.ram )

I would highly recommend this movie to anyone who wants to get a first-hand look at the world of a person with MI. And remember, no matter what you would say, even though it makes perfect sense to you, and is right in your mind, nobody will believe you. Believe me, I know; I've been MI for 15 years.

Tim McCann is a talented director who has an incredible eye for shooting and telling a story. This film is a perfect example of the creative resourcefulness that especially comes from independent filmmaking. Revolution #9 takes you on a journey and has you leaving the theater with a new perspective on a lot of levels.

The only thing schizophrenic about this movie is the constant clash with style over substance-a battle over which neither triumphs in the end. Michael Risley is soap opera pretty and would likely do well there. Not that handsome men don't have mental illnesses. I felt bad for the guy. It's as if the director made him step up to a buffet table and eat the whole buffet. His character, James Jackson, appears to have no redemption in him nor any fear over his mental erosion in between psychotic episodes. I couldn't believe the failure there. Also, as a mentally ill man who bounces in and out of psych wards, he was too well-kept. How he managed a near constant five o'clock shadow without growing an actual beard is beyond me. In my opinion, the movie belonged to Adrienne Shelly, who I noticed had an associate producer credit, and the erstwhile Callie Thorne. They struggled with conflicts not only internal but external-the uncertainty, the guilt, and the regret. I would hope the powers that be behind this film learned some sort of lesson from the experience. I am sure there are real stories to be told about mental illness and not on a grand scale of "A Beautiful Mind."

I feel bad about this movie because I thought it had a shot to be different-and as such be better.