Danika

Some spoilers ahead!Danika was a hard film to watch for me because Marisa Tomei (Danika) played the lead extremely well and reminded me of someone I dated that is going through a tough time dealing with a tragic loss. 3/4 of the film can be confusing due to Danika's constant hallucinations and mental state. Some of the hallucinations are obvious, others are more subtle. There are also times when the continuity is confusing. But this all works in the context of the story being told as opposed to bringing the film down because of the representation of mental illness and how the ending brings it all together. Mental illness can cause some people to hallucinate. Mental illness can also cause confusion, making it hard to follow things, becoming paranoid, defensive, aggressive, angry and/or depressed. The film gives a glimpse of how this may be perceived as it's happening and it is confusing. Unfortunately, it seems too many people watched the film and totally missed that point.In the last 1/4 of the film, it becomes clear what is really happening/happened to Danika because it's spelled out for the audience in a brutal car crash scene. I was impressed with how this was produced because the confusing nature of the story is brought into focus without actually breaking the flow and style that was established earlier. Basically, if Danika's kids are teens, then that's all a hallucination because none of them survived the crash which occurred when they were much younger. Earlier in the film when Danika is in the car with her kids and nearly runs over the homeless person, it was very well done the way the film reveals that not only was this a hallucination as well, showing a different outcome compare to what actually happened but the woman that Danika hit with the car, was herself. Initially it's hard to see exactly who she hit and the same person shows up again as Danika watches the person pushing a shopping cart from a distance during her youngest son's soccer match, also a hallucination. We see the exact same person up close at the end of the film and it's shown to be Danika, homeless woman, sitting on a bench that's a few feet away from the intersection where she caused the crash that killed her kids bringing the film full circle.Key details of Danika's paranoia displayed in the hallucinations were taken from newspaper stories she had in her shopping cart. Danika's shrink is actually the nanny her husband cheated on her with. The detective that showed up at the crash scene is the same detective that showed up at her house during a hallucination, when she reported a murder.The entire film is Danika homeless, mentally ill and reflecting on what happened to her and what could have been had she not given into despair, killing her kids as a result of her mental state and the affair of her husband. Let's be real, she wasn't supposed to survive the crash either. The affair of her husband and the following car crash didn't cause her unstable mental state. The affair pushed her over the edge but she apparently was already close to that edge already. When Danika received the call from the P.I. about which hotel her husband and the nanny were shagging in, Danika has two vials of medication sitting on the nightstand showing that she was dealing with mental illness even then. When she confronted her husband in the shower with the nanny, he mentions her paranoia and mental state as factors as to why he was balls deep in the help. During the majority of the film, during the hallucinations, Danika is constantly strong arming her kids to protect them from the evils of the world but the irony is, this is shown to be a reflection of her own guilt as she proved to be the greatest threat to her own kids when in reality she killed them in the car crash.5* A difficult film to watch but Marisa Tomei played the lead incredibly well, Danika also has a good supporting cast and the director did a masterful job telling a very potent story.

WARNING: SPOILERS *** For the people who didn't understand what was going on: I knew from the first scene of the mother and three children in the car, when the mother turns and looks at her son and keeps her eyes off the road for far too long, what probably happened. There is only one scene in the movie that reflects the mother's current reality, and that is the one at the very end. The rest of the movie is a conflation of reality, hallucination, and wish fulfillment that exists only in the mother's mind. The children never grow up, so those events never happen. Her husband may very well have had an affair with the nanny, and the scenes with the nanny as a psychiatrist reflect the times the mother confided in her, thinking the nanny was her friend. The mother's early experience with the death of her brother set her on the path to mental illness. In one scene she says she never forgave her mother for her brother's death, but it was herself she never forgave. She was the one who saw her brother running into the road, and saw the car coming, but she did nothing - she didn't scream, she didn't call out to him, she was frozen. She felt her brother's death was her fault. That early experience with death and guilt colored her world view for the rest of her life. When all three of her children die in an accident and it truly is her fault, it is more than her mind can take.That is what the movie is trying to convey, but it does not do it very well. The back-and-forth with the timeline, the hallucinations, the glimpse of the mother as a bag lady (although the audience is not supposed to know it at the time, but if you're paying attention, you know it), all of these things just didn't mesh the way they should have. It's a good attempt, but ultimately it fails, as witnessed by the number of people who either did not understand or did not finish watching the movie.

SPOILER ALERT.I love Marisa Tomei.For those of you who didn't understand the movie, I will explain it.Danika (Marisa Tomei) is delusional. Everything that you see in the movie is her hallucinations.A few years ago, Danika suspected that her husband was having an affair. She hired an investigator, who called her on the phone to tell her exactly where her husband was at that moment - - a motel room with a woman.Danika takes her 3 small children in the car and drives to the motel. She leaves the 3 children alone in the car and goes into the motel room. The motel room door is not locked, so she walks right in. She finds her husband and their nanny in the shower together, having sex. She confronts them and breaks glass and assaults them. She leaves them there, in the motel room.Danika goes to her car. She drives away, with her 3 children. Upset, she runs a red light. This causes a car accident, where Danika survives, but the 3 children die.We can assume that Danika's husband leaves her after that - - or, Danika had killed him with the broken glass in the hotel room.So, Danika ends up a homeless woman, spending her days walking around the neighborhood, remembering things and creating things. She imagines that her children are several years older and that she is seeing a therapist (who is actually the nanny created in her mind), and she sees various murders and bank robberies and kidnappings, and all kinds of horrible things that aren't real (or things that she has read from newspapers that she has collected through the years).At the end, we see Danika as a mentally ill homeless woman, just sitting on a park bench, then fishing through a garbage can, and then pushing a wagon full of her dead children's things, staring into space, and we realize that everything in the movie had been all of her hallucinations.

Something is missing in this movie, so it fails in conveying emotion. This despite the attempt to grip the audience with the thriller-like (mostly bloody) snap shots interleaved with ordinary action. The mechanism is simple: Danika had the trauma when she was a kid and her brother got killed in a car accident - in her mind, because of her mother lack of attention. As a mother herself she become over-protective to their children and in general afraid of what is bad in the world - and what this can do the their kids. This plot could have been psychologically developed in a different way, here all seems to be simplified. One adds to that the cheating of her husband with the psychologist who is treating Danika, and a quite out-of-place ending (Danika ending as a beggar in the street) and there you have it. You get up from your sofa and what is left in your memory are a few horror movie shots.

good film for the price

not bad overall or could it just have been a film about a woman having the worst period ever, ever