Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
On the night of Oct. 2, 2005, Hart and Dana Perry's 15-year-old son Evan jumped to his death from his New York City bedroom window. This moving film is the story, told by his filmmaker parents and others who knew him, of Evan’s life and death, and his life-long struggle with bipolar disorder. It delves into the complexity of Evan's disease, sharing his family's journey through the maze of mental illness. In showing how one family deals with generations of loss and grief, the film defies the stigma related to mental illness and suicide and tells a human story that touches everyone.
Boy Interrupted is a deeply personal and emotionally raw documentary in which filmmaker parents turn the camera on their own family's tragedy following their teenage son Evan's suicide. The film's plot follows a fairly conventional documentary structure—archival footage, interviews, chronological narrative—but the subject matter is handled with unusual intimacy and candor. The acting category, applied loosely to documentary subjects, reflects the genuine and unguarded nature of the family's on-screen presence, which is compelling but not exceptional in craft terms. Cinematography is competent and functional, using home video alongside more polished footage effectively without being visually distinctive. Novelty sits at average: while mental illness and suicide documentaries exist, the first-person parental filmmaker perspective lends it a singular emotional authenticity that lifts it slightly above pure formula. The ending, which grapples honestly with unresolved grief, generational trauma, and the unanswerable questions surrounding suicide, is genuinely affecting and lingers—earning the film its strongest mark there.