You Are Not I

1981

Action / Drama

2
IMDb Rating 6.7/10 10 427 427

woman director

Plot summary

A young woman escapes from a mental hospital during the chaos of a nearby multiple-car accident. She is mistaken for a shock victim and is driven to her sister's house by a rescue volunteer. Then the real story begins...

Director

Sara Driver Photo
Sara Driver

Top cast

Joan Welles Photo
Joan Welles as Inmate at Accident
Joan Janette Photo
Joan Janette as Dead Body
Melody Schneider Photo
Melody Schneider as Sister
Nan Goldin Photo
Nan Goldin as Accident Victim
720p.WEB 1080p.WEB
450.52 MB
956*720
English 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
23.976 fps
12 hr 49 min
Seeds ...
836.39 MB
1424*1072
English 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
23.976 fps
12 hr 49 min
Seeds ...

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by lor_

Interior psychodrama

My review was written in December 1985 after watching the film on New Video cassette.Made in 1981, Sara Driver's featurette "You Are Not I" is an intriguing but overlong interior psychodrama.The angular-featured Suzanne Fletcher toplines as Ethel, a sympathetic mental patient who escapes from an asylum to visit the home of her sister (Melody Schneider). Relying mainly on evenly-spoken voice-over narration by Ethel, picture succeeds in presenting her out-of-it point-of-view. Tricky ending has Ethel thinking she has effected a personality transfer with her sister, with perhaps thw wrong woman sent back to the asylum. Visual and narration clues indicate otherwise.Though Jim Jarmusch ("Stranger than Paradise") has photographed the film in black & white with a look that reeks of a pretentious student film, Driver succeeds in the difficult task of portraying the character's introverted personality. Acting as her own editor, she could have improved the pic by pruning her lengthy takes. With leading lady Fletcher generally sitting quite still (under the impression that she can will things to happen), film's mood approximates the finale of "Psycho", where Anthony Perkins remained immobile, contemplating a fly.
Reviewed by Perception_de_Ambiguity 7 / 10

You are not I, but for three-quarters of an hour we are her

Off-her-rocker Ethel (super lethargic weirdo off-her-rocker, not bats*** crazy hysterical off-her-rocker) usually is institutionalized like a good weirdo but somehow finds herself on the side of a road. She's wandering about a car crash site where she does cute things like putting a stone into the mouth of all the dead people from the crash. Some more or less helpful guys drive her to an address that they think is her home, but it is the house of the sister who used to take care of her until she had enough of the family loon. How will the sister react and what will she do with Ethel? But maybe more importantly what will Ethel do and in her own mind what will she think she is doing?The American Gothic novel "We Have Always Lived in the Castle" by Shirley Jackson is one of my favorite books. The protagonist of that novel is the very strange 18-year-old Mary Katherine Blackwood, also simply known as Merricat. The thing is that we experience everything through her skewed perception, it's not so much Merricat who appears strange, but everybody else does. This makes her likable to the reader even as she does and thinks quite evil things. Ethel basically is Merricat ten years later, and she only drifted even further into her own world. For another point of reference think of Norman Bates in the last scene of 'Psycho' (the fly).Like Merricat we don't really know much about Ethel and we only pick up a few pieces here and there. She's a mysterious character and remains mysterious until the end. And like "We Have Always Lived in the Castle" we see the world tainted in the protagonist's colors and it's all a bit funny in its strangeness. We hear a lot of Ethel's cute ideas, like, she's convinced she can make bad things happen to people just by motionlessly sitting, staring at the floor and concentrating very hard or whatever. Don't expect any logic or consistency in her thoughts. One particularly cute idea of hers is that her sister moved all the furniture, the doors, the staircase, etc from one side of the house to the other since the last time Ethel was there, left is now right, and right is left. She's terribly amused by the fact that her sister must have put enormous effort into moving everything just so that in the end everything looks basically the same as before.I would like to see a movie adaption of "Castle". 'You Are Not I' isn't it, but to me it kind of had the novel's feel and with the parallels between the protagonists I could consider it a spin-off in spirit. 'You Are Not I' is in black and white and very slow paced. Much of it isn't terribly exciting but the ominous atmosphere keeps it compelling and it makes up for any lengths with an ending that is both revealing about Ethel's character and wonderfully ambiguous and chilling. Not that the film would have to make up for much, it's 46 minutes short.
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