It's all in the perspectives when talking about our mental health, considering the wild and crazy world that we are living in right now. Austrian director Florian Pochlatko plays with this idea in his zany debut feature How to be Normal and the Oddness of the Other World. We see Pia (played drolly by Luisa-Céline Gaffron), a sullen young woman, being discharged from a mental institution and moving back to her childhood room in her concerned parents' house. Mom, Elfie (Elke Winkens), is a voice actor for narrating documentary programs and dad Klaus (Cornelius Obonya) owns a printing company.
Jumbled up timeline and fantasy sequences, you don't quite know what we see on screen is real or not, neither does our unreliable narrator Pia, who is on a variety of colorful anti-psychotic pills. We get to know a little bit of details in Pia's life - her boyfriend Joni (Felix Pöchhacker) has moved on, but Pia is still deeply in love. And it gets a little touchy when she confronts him and his new love. Also Pia is paranoid about men in black suits, very much like Agent Smith from the Matrix movies, following her around everywhere. Are they real or her drug induced hallucinations?
In order to give some stability to Pia, her parents decide to give her a job at dad's company, doing dull office work. They hope that a daily routine would help her. But the real world is not as stable as everyone hopes to be. Increasingly sensationalist tendencies in documentary topics that Elfie narrates - parasite infected zombie snails, wayward asteroids that might collide with the earth, combined with daily atrocities and natural disasters blaring on TV, test Elfie's sanity causing her to crash her car in a traffic heavy motorway. Klaus struggles with his company being taken over by a huge conglomerate called 'Friendly' (a stand-in for Amazon). It's as if there's a very thin line distinguishing being normal and insane. Not only Pia, but everyone slowly loses grip on their reality, as the world keeps spinning out of control.
How to be Normal asks big questions about what is perceived as normal when the world around us is insane. Pia, constantly under pressure to be normal, is trying to hold on to the idea of home and self-worth in the world constantly in turmoil. Pochlatko, like Daniels' Everything Everywhere All at Once, balances the heady subject with plenty of humor and great visual gags. As paranoid and delusional Pia appears to be, she provides the film's many hilarious moments as she appears as a giant monster with a piece of Gouda cheese across her face lumbering like a Gozilla in the city, or using the post-it notes to cover her face at her job. Gaffron is fantastic as a acne ridden, heavily medicated young woman desperately trying to find a footing and self-worth, so is the rest of the cast with their droll performances.
Can Pia find peace and stop slashing her wrists with a plastic knife? Is there a brighter future for mankind? Pochlatko poses these questions and asks us to contemplate what it means to be sane and normal in the world that is completely nuts.
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