The director told us she brought in screenwriters to doctor her heartfelt script referencing experience with an epileptic friend. I fear they did more harm than good. We're all familiar with the structure that divides a film into parts, each headed with a different third-person-limited POV character's name. Here first we get his, in which they meet not so much cute as mystery-woman mysterious. Then we get hers in which she turns out to be quite ordinary, flashing back to cover the same events as in his chapter. Not Rashomon, no conflict, just different POV. Each of these initial parts ends with his fit which he hadn't anticipated and she doesn't understand until she does. As we enter the film's third section in which, for a while, as he regains normalcy, there's a crescendo of POVs, hers and his simultaneously, that had me thinking I'd really like the film. I wanted that crescendo to extend as long as possible. But, no. It becomes her as sympathetic onlooker, him as cause epileptic. She or her script doctors should have stayed in his head much longer than they do, even if doing so would have meant inventing what's there. I'm confident that if she had, what she invented would have been true enough.
All that said, parts are very powerful and the water imagery much appreciated.
