Neverwas

Neverwas (2005) is a drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Joshua Michael Stern and starring Aaron Eckhart, Ian McKellen, Nick Nolte, Brittany Murphy, Jessica Lange, William Hurt, and Alan Cumming. Psychiatrist Zach Riley turns down a university post to take a staff job at Millwood, a private psychiatric facility. What he does not tell anyone is that this is the exact place where his father, novelist T.L. Pierson, lived for years before writing a beloved children's fantasy.

Zach wants to understand what happened to his father. He finds a patient named Gabriel, played by McKellen with a carefully controlled fragility — a man who believes, with total sincerity, that he is a character inside T.L. Pierson's story. The longer Zach listens, the harder it becomes to separate his father's imagination from what might have actually taken place at Millwood.

The ensemble is unusually strong for a film that slipped past most audiences on its release. McKellen's performance alone makes it worth the two hours — a quiet, unsettling portrait of a mind that found its own mythology and lived inside it. Stream Neverwas (2005) online on iFILM.