I feel like Hannah Schareck, the writer-director-producer of the chilling German short film Expo In Vivo, trusts her audience just as much as the therapist in her film trusts her patient. While many people understand that unwanted intrusive thoughts can be a large part of obsessive-compulsive disorder, I feel like a lesser-explored concept is that those thoughts can sometimes revolve around harming yourself or others. This could be because that part of it is disturbing and hard to depict on-screen.
Expo In Vivo, based on patient studies of over-exposure therapy, does this very effectively precisely because it is calm, observational, and non-sensational. For a film that involves intrusive thoughts about a knife, it’s about as calm as it could be. The therapist gently draws the patient out of herself and has her describe her compulsive thoughts as the therapy progresses. One of my favorite, most telling lines is when the patient says that she doesn’t have any conflicts with her partner—it’s mostly that she “just doesn’t say anything.”
Expo In Vivo de-stigmatizes intrusive thoughts of harm by showing that they are compulsive, undesirable, and often characteristic of repressed issues. Most importantly of all, it demonstrates that there’s a possible cure for them through therapy. I feel like this short is just the sort of quiet, artful, de-stigmatizing work we should be showcasing.
You can still watch Expo In Vivo for FREE through 11/3 in the virtual festival:
https://watch.eventive.org/mentalfilmness2024/play/6704b2b8dd02d60047462b6c/66f0895e37bff9004821a887
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