“How to be normal” in the cinema – how shouldn’t you get insane?

The question asked that the film “How to be normal” raises, i.e. how one can manage in a resolution in a resolution to be what is still considered “normal”, the film does not answer, so much is revealed. Rather, he declares them unalterable.

“How to be normal” is the feature film debut of the Austrian director Florian Pochlatko and shows a young woman, Pia (Luisa-Céline Gaffron), who, especially released from psychiatry, move back into the children’s room with their parents, in order to somehow arrive again in the, well, normality. This attempt to record a “normal” life is counteracted. No matter what Pia does, everything quickly becomes overwhelmed. For you, but also for your environment. The people around them are quite hard -working and understanding, but mostly in such a way that they are largely as a helper. Ex-boyfriend Joni is overwhelmed with his love for Pia, although he is still the most suitable as a savior and maintains something like a good wire to her. But Pia also poses new problems: Joni now has a new girlfriend, so lovesickness is coming to everything else. Ultimately, the 12-year-old neighboring boy with whom she pulls through the forests and who shares at least the strangeness in the world with her comes with her, but from a childish perspective. The acquaintance with the boy is the most successful of many subordinate acts, because this is most likely to make it clear how Pias trials working as part of the world around her fail: her view of this world is more fantastic. The prepared boy is in a similar situation to Pia itself: Between the childish, fantastic imaging and the dawn of the recurring adult reality, it must be balanced how much of the second is reasonable for the inexperienced soul of the adolescents. Children of this age are typically extremely curious about the adult world in which they will have to and want to enter soon, but at the same time refuse to look at the things they cannot understand (can) frighten or overwhelm them. For adolescents, this is an inevitable process, so to speak, “normal”, with a mid -twenties, such a captivity in an intermediate world is problematic for everyone involved.

The film does not go beyond this certainly correct, but also somewhat trivial observation regarding the inner life and analysis of Pias Wahn and so Pochlatko’s visual magic remains – everywhere in “How to Be Normal” it is teeming with pop cultural allusions – not much more than the illustration of PIA’s not completed development and its associated mental illness.

In “How to Be Normal” we see a subordinating world, a world in which “normality” is already in dissolution, in which the social of individuals is also at stake in view of climate academic, digitization and market radicalization. None of the characters in the film seems to feel good in his skin. As a spokeswoman for natural documentary, Pia’s mother has to announce the apocalypse and no longer understands the world itself. In the father’s office there are not only men in black suits that should somehow “optimize processes”, but the whole printing company in which he works in a managerial position, is for sale or is released for shooting. In a baseless world there is no longer a stop and especially not for people who also stuck in a fantasy world.

Pia has practically internalized her delusional escapism as the only way out and refuses to return to reality, thinks so, so to speak, constantly in another film or becomes a vita dance on the window front of an expensive restaurant.

In view of what is expected in adult reality in adult reality, Pias is escape, so the film suggests it, even extremely understandable, almost reasonable. This “way out” is in truth, because Pia suffers a lot from the situation.

In this way, the film leaves its audience a bit perplexed: Pochlatko’s film world shows an underlying, apocalyptic society, which at the same time tries to somehow maintain its musty, bourgeois normality. And how should you not get insane within this madness? (Which might have been the more suitable title). The representation of a world, which is still infinitely stubborn in the existential decline, may be in addition to Pochlatko’s fine hand for coarse humor (in particular, the very beautiful story of the cat, which was shit by Pia’s fellow patient into the litter box, which saves the animal and gives the cat owners a very romantic moment) the most successful in the film and an extremely precise observation. While the world is disintegrating the protagonists, everything must still be printed out and filed in the father’s office, and if PIA asks this extensively meaningless employment therapy whether you could not do this digitally, she is asked in a praise: “But you already know that we are a printing shop?”

“How to be normal”, Austria 2025. Direction and book: Florian Pochlatko. With: Luisa-Céline Gaffron, Elke Winkens, Cornelius Obonya, Felix Pöchhacker, David Scheid, Lion Thomas Tatzber. 102 min. September 11th: September 11th.