Movie Review by Kristin: Netflix’s BRAIN ON FIRE

Holy shish kabobs!

I saw the trailer for BRAIN ON FIRE on Netflix a while ago, and I finally had a chance to sit down and watch it this week.

For the most part it was pretty slow-moving, but seeing as this movie was based on the real life story of Susannah Cahalan, it was also pretty terrifying.

SYNOPSIS: Susannah Cahalan is a promising writer at the New York Post. She’s young, she’s happy and she’s living her best life in NYC. When she begins exhibiting unexplained erratic & violent behavior, her parents & doctors race the clock to correctly diagnose her condition and to bring Susannah back.

The first half of the movie, as I mentioned, was pretty slow-moving. This is no action movie, but it’s the telling of the real Susannah Cahalan’s experience with a rare condition called anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis. So, the slowness is just us watching a normal day in Susannah’s life before experiencing any symptoms. Once she begins experiencing symptoms, it’s a downhill battle because no one knows exactly what’s causing her behavior and none of her doctors know what her diagnosis is just yet.

It was interesting to watch the movie and watch this person go through something as terrifying as basically being trapped inside of your own body, and then to read the facts about how many people go through this unknowingly.

If you want to watch the movie for yourself, you can catch it on Netflix now, and you can also read the memoir by the real Susannah Cahalan, also titled Brain on Fire.