AVClub: It wouldn’t be entirely accurate to call Touched With Fire an opposites-attract romance; both members of its central couple are poets, both suffer from bipolar disorder, and they meet at a psychiatric hospital where neither of them have precisely intended to stay. But Marco (Luke Kirby) and Carla (Katie Holmes) approach their illnesses very differently. Marco tries leaning into his manic episodes, insisting that it makes him experience the world with deeper, more vivid feelings, decrying medication as the real problem. Carla is more self-conscious, showing up at her childhood home in the middle of the night to ask her mother (Christine Lahti) when it was, exactly, that her mental health problems first emerged. Like any number of romantic heroes, they get on each other’s nerves at first, during a group therapy session. But a few days later, they’re each other’s whole world.
EW
Van Gogh, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Byron, Plath: Mania was the match that helped ignite their creative gifts, according to psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison’s 1996 case study Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. Filmmaker Paul Dalio—who is himself bipolar—explores those same ties, adding beat poetry and romance to the mix in his earnest, uneven debut.
Deadline:
Roadside Attractions has acquired U.S. rights to Paul Dalio’s debut feature Touched With Fire, the Katie Holmes-starrer that premiered at this year’s SXSW with the title Mania Days. The pic revolves around two bipolar poets whose art is fueled by their emotional extremes. When they meet in a psychiatric hospital their romance brings out all the beauty and darkness of their condition until they have to choose between sanity and love. Holmes and Luke Kirby star along with Griffin Dunne, Christine Lahti and Bruce Altman. An early 2016 theatrical release is planned.
