It’s disturbing, the thought that the day may come when you fail to snap out of one of those strange moments of dissociation. It turns out that what you might have dismissed as mere teenage solipsism is actually a medical condition – “depersonalisation”. Screenwriter Hudson Milbank has it in Numb, a misfortune he blames – wilfully ignoring his various deep-rooted psychological issues – on smoking a joint too fast. As he feels himself sinking into insanity he clutches at drugs and therapies, looking for something that will restore his grip on reality.
Numb leavens the darkness of its subject matter with acutely observed, mordant comedy. In an inspired piece of casting, Matthew Perry plays Hudson: as well as extracting laughs from the tiniest of details, he convincingly conveys a mix of vulnerability and stubbornness, and a sense of his own ridiculousness. But ultimately, after an epiphanic conversation with a bizarrely clean, generous and philosophical tramp, Hudson is saved by his love for a cutesy, quirky girl, and the film spirals into romcom sickliness, complete with video store scene and driving off into the sunrise.
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