Escaping the Madhouse: The Nellie Bly Story
Short description
Escaping the Madhouse: The Nellie Bly Story follows Nellie Bly, a reporter who sets out to expose conditions at a women's psychiatric institution by pretending to be mentally ill so she can be committed and report from inside. After undergoing treatment, she is left with no memory of how she arrived or who she really is, and the film traces what happens during her stay.
The film is based on actual events and was released in 2019 as a television movie. It was directed by Karen Moncrieff, whose earlier credits include The Dead Girl, The Trials of Cate McCall, Petals on the Wind and The Keeping Hours; this is the fifth feature in that sequence. Helen Childress wrote the screenplay. Christina Ricci plays Nellie Bly, with Judith Light as Matron Grady, Joshua Bowman as Dr. Josiah, Anja Savcic as Lottie, Nikki Duval as Nurse Fenton and Lauren Cochrane as Nurse Lila. It is a Canadian production made for Lifetime and runs 88 minutes.
On TMDB it holds a rating of 7.4 out of 10 from roughly 140 votes, a small but favourable sample. Placed alongside the director's previous work, the film continues her interest in women facing institutions and closed worlds, here through a historical case presented as a thriller.
What's left behind the scenes
- Blackwell's Island was renamed Roosevelt Island in 1973.
- The film is based on the book “Ten Days in a Mad-House: A Narrative of My Life in an Asylum,” published in 1887. Bly (1864-1922), at the request of editor Joseph Pulitzer (1847-1911), feigned mental illness and deceived several doctors, after which she spent 10 days in an asylum and then published an exposé about the appalling conditions, the abuse of staff, and the fact that some patients had been admitted there clearly by mistake.
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