Brain on Fire

Brain on Fire (2017) — watch online on iFILM, directed by Gerard Barrett and based on Susannah Cahalan's memoir of the same name. Chloë Grace Moretz plays Susannah, a 21-year-old New York Post reporter whose life collapses over the course of a single month. Also starring Thomas Mann, Richard Armitage, Carrie-Anne Moss, and Tyler Perry. Canada/Ireland co-production, 89 minutes.

Susannah starts losing sleep, then control of her moods, then her memory. She has seizures the doctors can't explain. She's told it's stress, then alcohol, then psychiatric. Each diagnosis is wrong. For a month she sits in a hospital room not knowing who she is while her parents — played by Armitage and Moss — refuse to accept that there are no more tests to run.

What finally saves her is a rare autoimmune condition that the medical literature barely recognized at the time. The film's real punch isn't the mystery diagnosis but the speed at which a healthy young woman is written off as mentally ill rather than medically sick. Stream Brain on Fire (2017) online on iFILM.