Brain on Fire

Susannah Cahalan is a young journalist at the New York Post whose life begins to unravel when she starts hearing voices and suffering seizures. As her behaviour swings between agitation and withdrawal, her memory and sense of self slip away, and doctors offer conflicting diagnoses without finding the real cause. Based on Cahalan's own account of her illness, the film follows her family and partner as they push for answers while her condition worsens.

Gerard Barrett directed and wrote the screenplay, adapting the memoir Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness. Chloë Grace Moretz plays Susannah, with Thomas Mann as her boyfriend Stephen Grywalski, Richard Armitage and Carrie-Anne Moss as her parents, Jenny Slate as a colleague and Tyler Perry as a doctor. Charlize Theron produced the film, made in Ireland and Canada.

The film was released in February 2017 and runs 88 minutes. The critics' rating is 4.6 out of 10 from 15 reviews, while audiences are far more positive: 6.6 out of 10 on IMDb from 26,000 votes and 7 out of 10 on TMDB from 1,443 votes. The gap suggests that viewers responded more warmly to the personal story than reviewers did.