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Welcome To Me

  • Film
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
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Time Out says

4 out of 5 stars

Kristen Wiig plays a mentally unbalanced lottery winner who buys her own talk show

Alice Klieg hasn’t turned off her television in 11 years. The set’s exhausted images are constantly flickering around the walls of the musty one-bedroom apartment she shares with several hundred VHS tapes, each containing a single episode of ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show’.

‘Welcome to Me’ is about an unusual person – but this dark comedy makes it perfectly clear that the ‘me’ of the title is no mere eccentric. On the contrary, this is that rarest of birds: a genuinely funny movie about mental illness. Kristen Wiig plays Alice, who was diagnosed with manic-depressive disorder when she was 16, and she still has more prescriptions than friends. On the upside, she’s just won $86 million in the lottery.

Frustrated when the local news cuts away when she’s collecting her oversize novelty cheque, Alice buys her own talk show on a cash-strapped infomercial channel. Going off her meds and blazing through her fortune, she creates ‘Welcome to Me’, in which she rides onto the stage in a swan boat and delivers segments that range from practical advice (‘matching colours to emotion’) to outsider art (vivid recreations of her most traumatic adolescent moments). But a smart script coupled with Wiig’s resolutely humane performance ensures that the laughter never comes at her expense.

Written by
David Ehrlich

Release Details

  • Release date:Friday 25 March 2016
  • Duration:87 mins

Cast and crew

  • Director:Shira Piven
  • Screenwriter:Eliot Laurence
  • Cast:
    • Kristen Wiig
    • Tim Robbins
    • Wes Bentley
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