Therapist Reacts to A SILENT VOICE

[Music] and depression doesn't go away doesn't lift for most people but there's a capacity to feel again there's a capacity to experience joy the cure for so many things is connection and we may think no one wants to connect with me but we just need to find the right people it is so beautifully composed i get why so many people love this film [Music] welcome to cinema therapy i am alan c wright professional filmmaker and i need therapy i'm jonathan decker licensed therapist and i love movies what do you got for me today my friend today i'm going to have you react to one of our most requested films ever 2016's a silent voice it is a japanese anime film this is our first venture into anime it is such a diverse genre and i totally understand yeah it has it has fans all over the globe and it can do and you are very vocal yeah and i guess i i think it's not a genre it's a style right it is a style because anime can be western it could be comedy it could be romantic it could be horror it could be akira which is i don't know what that is but it's amazing and in this case it's a heavy heavy drama heavy drama about teens and bullying and suicide yeah it's it was a lot yeah it was but you know what it was it was very uplifting in his messaging it was and it ended in a good place as far as what it's trying to get us to do when it comes to treating one another there's a lot of power to this story this episode is sponsored by a surf shark sur shark is a vpn or virtual private network it'll protect your security online which is great sure we're excited to use it to watch content in other countries unlock that content-y goodness you can get so many shows that are available in other countries in fact you can unlock the 15 largest netflix country libraries 15 largest all the crap you can't get wherever you are right now which might be here or somewhere else and stuff that's good also the good stuff also the good stuff but let's be honest it's netflix so a lot of it's crap wow but some of it's really great you can't keep that in here netflix isn't paying us surf shark is a great way to unlock netflix's crap so if you're in the us you can get stuff on your netflix that you can't get here like friends rick and morty doctor who oh doctor who you can also access bbc iplayer hulu if you don't get that where you are we don't get bbc iplayer which is awesome bbc iplayer is awesome yes please let us have a nice thing britain we have a nice thing they gave us america they didn't give us america we took it from them unlock all this content by installing smurfs uh surf shark smurf shark is a different thing on your phone your tablet uh your tv really any sort of device all across the house and the land and this is really big not a euphemism you can use this on an unlimited number of devices and the biggest thing of all 30-day money-back guarantee if you don't like it you don't pay for it go to surfshark.deals forward slash cinema therapy and use our code cinematherapy cinema therapy that's it to get 83 off and an additional three months free thanks surf shark for helping us watch more movies so what's our setup well uh ishida is a kid he's going to school he's kind of popular has some friends elementary school right elementary school yeah young young kid he's like fifth grade maybe somebody a girl shows up she's transferred into the class her name is nishimiya she is deaf yeah and uh communicates with people using little flip books yeah notebook right write down your message bring down your message look at this and if they're open she teaches them to sign and right and there's one girl in the class who starts learning to sign but ishida is you know kind of a punk kid like many of us were and uh bullies her um kind of goes along with there are other people in the class that are bullying her as well he kind of gets wrapped up in it and pushes it further than anybody else and it does some really pretty pretty heinous stuff psychological torture and physical abuse absolutely you feel so bad for nishimiya uh because she just wants to fit in and she just wants to be loved and have a friend yeah and then we jump forward in time several years uh ishida and ishmael are still in school but they're almost done with high school and because of his bullying he has become bullied he's been outcast people said that guys trouble stay away from him and so he's been lonely and to where he doesn't look people in the eye because he hates himself for how awful he was he's been taught that he's awful and he doesn't look people in the face and when everyone's represented i thought this was interesting i thought it was brilliant i've just a wonderful touch of filmmaking anytime he looks up and sees faces he doesn't see a face he like puts an x in front of everyone's faces yeah and when he finally opens up to uh nagatsuka who is like my favorite derpy best friend of all time you know he was a great character uh the x like peels off like paper and falls on the ground it's that's a fantastic little touch i love it so anytime he actually connects with someone the ex falls off their face but he's gonna take his own life because he feels so unloved yeah and he realizes before he does that he should go make amends so he he actually chooses to not go through with his his uh suicide attempts because before he leaves you've got to make things right with her he then attempts to befriend her there may be some like attraction there but mostly it's a very pained strained psychologically fraught relationship and she's nice but maybe not fully understanding his intentions but it the whole film is like this just beautiful well this is nishimiya's this is sister she takes pictures of dead things so she takes pictures of dead things so that her sister can have pictures and see what death looks like because nishimiya the deaf girl has been so bullied she wants to die too yeah so here ishida is trying to befriend the sister of the girl he bullied he's trying to be a better person i can see the difference so it's way better in japanese yeah see now he's hiding her face she's hiding her face and just looking at her ashamed what's beautiful about this film is someone who's done awful and trying to be good and it's not easy it's not a quick fix yeah it's a film long fixed she sees him and he sees her and that's this film does a lot of things really really beautifully the camera work for lack of a better term there's so many close inserts of hands and just objects feet they're the little details that you remember from deeply emotional moments yeah and it does a really good job of of picking those out and focusing on them another thing that's really beautiful about this film is the score and the sound very atmospheric it's beautiful yeah yeah it's it's really really powerful so ishida i'm i i really connected with his bullying was to make friends his bullying was to keep friends his bullying was right to put someone else down so my friends and i could have a laugh and it was the basic human need for connection sought in a maladaptive way exactly and it backfired not only did he hurt somebody else he hurt himself because people decided they didn't want to get in trouble at school by hanging out with him their parents didn't want them around him and you need then even just people of integrity are like i don't want to be around that guy he's bad news yeah and what ends up happening is both the person that you would normally if imagine a movie about about biff tannen in back to the future coming to his senses and trying to make things right wouldn't work with biff tannen because ironically he's a cartoon character he's a cartoon character in a live-action movie ishida is a very well-rounded human yeah it has made a movie and he is he's so alone and he's hurting so badly and the neat hat trick of this film is you don't just sympathize with the bullied you sympathize with the bully yeah and he realizes that decency making things right atonement is the word right atonement of making amends making restitution is the only way that he's going to be at peace yeah i i actually i feel like this film captures depression one of the things that actually works quite well in the film is when you bring the pace down a little bit and you can focus on those details yeah they want you to feel the prolonged awkwardness of being uncomfortable in your own skin yeah of feeling not wanted of feeling judged of feeling like everything you try and do just makes things worse and instead of giving you a little bit of that and then some comic relief the resolution doesn't even really come to the end it's not meant as entertainment it's definitely not no it's to get you to think about something i would say the mission of the film is it's an empathy jump start yeah you know for for the viewer and so often we have we do have compassion for the bullied but not for the bullies we think well you know they just deserve anything that's coming to them because they're just awful people right and to see the humanity in everybody is a gift from this film and that's that's really really beautiful and the capacity for redemption for everybody whether or not they take it yeah but but the path to restitution and atonement is through being willing to suffer discomfort and pain to do right by another person so here we are in ishida has been you know working with nishimiya and kind of gathering a bunch of their friends from from elementary school and uh they're all kind of getting together to have sort of a little bit of a reckoning and apologize for things and she's always minimizing what she did yeah can you imagine listening to the conversation but looking at the river like it's very realistic but he keeps avoiding people's faces because he's so ashamed you know and then he sits down into it he's more or less accurately diagnosing everything that's going on but taking way too much responsibility for himself he's trying to so have you ever dealt with someone like this in in therapy who's has caused some pain but it's trying to take too much on like it's all my fault yeah in therapy there's something called the identified patient and the identified patient is there is one person they're the scapegoat there's one person who is not solely responsible for everything but everybody or a lot of people will make it about as if it's all their fault and so for a long time ishida has been carrying the brunt of everything and that's that's how he got the rep at school as all the other kids threw him under the bus and said he's the bully not us and he's finally calling everybody else out if anyone says one person is the problem or if a whole group is saying you're the problem the issue with that is it feels like well multiple voices are saying it so it must be true it must be true right if people are telling you you are the problem don't believe it because it's not true we don't exist in a vacuum and we all interplay off of each other own your stuff sure here i actually like what he's doing he's a little harsh about it but he's owning his stuff but he's done owning theirs yeah and it you know he's he's pulled this group together to you know try and make nishimiya feel better about herself and it just turns into the hot potato of blame they're just throwing the hot potato around instead of doing right by her but then porneishimiya does what he's always done which is she blames herself right and she says they were all friends before i came along i i spent some time in japan growing up and this is not a uniquely japanese thing but you know sticking out and being different is very much culturally not okay yeah and so i think nishimiya sees herself as one of those cultural outliers that because she's so different because she's disabled she creates a narrative about herself and how it causes disharmony with the group that's part of the beauty of film and art you know anywhere around the world here in the united states you have american filmmakers and they make films that shine a light on american culture absolutely both the positive and the ugly side right and that's going to happen in any country around the world so we're looking at a commentary on japanese culture and the flip side of what you were talking about is this incredible human capacity for compassion and forgiveness which again is universal but in a silent voice takes on a japanese flavor so he's he saved her from taking her life but he got injured and now she's here on the bridge and he's it made her feel even worse because he nearly died to save her so he woke from his coma and he's she's outside the hospital sad of what happened to him yeah ah the color palette in this film and the painterly but realistic nature of all the surroundings is just lovely he's come up close to it a couple of times and then always backed off because he's afraid whatever foreign [Music] is [Music] that's a beautiful line what's his hands down like end of message which means friend yep this happens all throughout the film as people try to take a step into connection and then they they're so insecure bail out of it it's it's slower and it's more pensive than western audiences are used to um but it also breathes and i love that the moment he takes he actually apologizes and takes accountability for what he did and he says i want to apologize to everyone properly so he's finally apologized to everyone [Music] he goes he gets invited by his friends to this fair and he's looking around and seeing exes and looking at feet can't make eye contact with people and there was no sound like he wasn't really hearing them and now it's all rushing in [Music] the music here is wonderful so good sees his friends this is his family and friends whose love he had a hard time accepting because he didn't think he was worth it [Music] and depression doesn't go away doesn't lift for most people it's something they still have to wrestle with it's still there but there's a capacity to feel again there's a capacity to experience joy and and depression and having done something terrible are not the same thing in this case they're interlinked but yeah but the cure for so many things is connection and we may think no one wants to connect with me but we just need to find the right the right people [Music] i mean i don't want to oversimplify but most people who hurt others are hurting themselves they just want to be loved and some won't accept it others will that scene where he finally accepts other people's love man it is just a gut punch it's it is so beautifully composed the music is incredible the performance from the voice actor playing issue that is great the animation is fantastic and uh that scene i get why so many people love this film and the thing is when he was going around his high school and assuming people hated him if you if you read what people are saying uh there's some people are judging him but there are some people who are concerned for him or some people who are trying to connect with him and he just sees feet and exes because he believes they all hate him right and he believes is inherently unlovable and it's not true there are people who the ex will fall and they are accessible to you and they're here for you if you're there for them and if you're humble and accountable and it's there's a lot of beauty in this film if you want to grow the way ishida grows if you want to take accountability for your actions if you want to make things right and have healthy connections i have created a strengths builder what that is is i walk you through the film and tell you from a licensed therapist what steps to take and what exercises to do to experience this type of growth in your life so we've got a silent voice slash shape of voice strengths builder on our membership site which you can find right here go check it out or here down below there's links to go take a look at that and thank you so much for watching and please we would love it when you share this with your friends it means them to us and uh we normally end these with kind of a jokey back and forth uh this one's too heavy for that heavy and beautiful and beautiful true so i think we're just gonna say watch movies [Music] you

Channel: Cinema Therapy

Views: 192,520

Rating: 4.9938726 out of 5

Keywords: cinematherapy, cinema therapy, mental health, counseling, therapy, mental health therapy, Jonathan Decker, Alan Seawright

Id: h8VHaNeuw3o

Length: 22min 53sec (1373 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 07 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Ifyoulike97]

Very good reaction! Tks for share!