Shock Head Soul

Essentially a talking-heads documentary with dramatic and animated inserts, Pummell’s account of Daniel Paul Schreber, a German judge whose 1903 book on his own madness was influential on early psychotherapy, is more imaginative than that description sounds. The initial strangeness of seeing Pummell’s various interviewees – including film historian Ian Christie – dressed in turn-of-the-century garb dissipates as we realise Pummell opts for the interesting and unusual all along the way, including employing trippy visuals in an attempt to capture Schreber’s fragile state of mind. There are plenty of heady ideas – but Pummell never loses sight of the emotional trauma of Schreber’s difficult childhood and later troubled disposition.