Out of Darkness (1994)

SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

I stumbled across this on the Lifetime Movie Network, and was blown away to finally see an unglamorous, starkly accurate portrayal of someone with schizophrenia. Kudos to Diana Ross, that can't possibly be an easy performance!!! Being bi-polar, I've been in and out of mental wards as a patient, seeing other patients with schizophrenia. This is the first time I've ever seen a movie or television show that captures the frightening reality without making it seem like a mere eccentricity. Now, if someone would just make a decent movie about being bi-polar, so I could point to it to help people understand what I go through.

Diana Ross earned a Golden Globe nomination for her heart-wrenching portrayal of Paulie Cooper, a young medical student battling paranoid schizophrenia. Her illness caused her to be institutionalised 43 times, and had a devastating effect on her family, financially as well as emotionally. A sister who was jealous of the attention she got yet sympathetic to her illness, a mother struggling to provide for her sick daughter yet aware of the friction her attention-giving was causing between the siblings and Paulie's own daughter, who struggled to deal with loving her mother yet being scared of her. After trying several medications over many years, she finally finds one that is effective. She tries to return to her medical studies but is thwarted at every turn, being told how her past exam successes no longer counted because of the 17 years that had passed, and how her diagnosis meant she wouldn't be able to cope with the stress of medical study, the long hours and wouldn't be able to afford it anyway.When she meets the homeless mentally-disturbed black woman outside the grocery store, and hears the worker tell her to move away from the shop front, she first offers her money and then food, which the woman is too scared to take until no-one is around her. Paulie finally sees just how she used to appear to other people. She knows in that moment just how far she's come, and what life will be like if she relapses. At that point, she cries, not only for the woman but for herself.This is incredible acting from Diana. She appears with the most minimal of make-up from beginning to end, in ordinary clothes, in effect as an ordinary person would. She's not afraid to scream, cry, fight, she's not concerned with her image except in relation to portraying Paulie honestly. You get to see her mental struggle in all its rawness. There's no glossing over the worst parts of her illness - you see her boyfriend leave when he can't accept her past, her screaming to fight and block out the auditory hallucinations, her increasing distance and public estrangement from some of her family, you see her having to accept her daughter telling her that she loves her but doesn't want to live with her because "it's too hard". But she's not the only star here. The cast has been well-selected, is very believable, and the whole production comes across as a family struggling within themselves as individuals as well as with their relationship with Paulie. This is a very effective portrayal of how mental illness can affect a family in ways they hadn't expected, and it's to its credit that it didn't sugar-coat the hell that mental illness can be. The film is based on a true story, and is as true to mental illness as it could be.

this film is really about longterm illness, or "loss of life" and the devastation it causes. the character was a brilliant, vivacious young woman. when she was born the doctor said this child has been "touched by god" because she was so beautiful. noone was sharper, nobody was quicker than Paulie. she was going to be a doctor, in her 3rd year of medical school. and then she got schitzophrenia. 18 years later she wakes up. shes 43, not 25 any more. shes lost 18 YEARS of her life. her life doesnt exist anymore. - her sister is a middle aged woman, who resents her for the way shes behaved, her mother is resigned to the fact her daughter is mentally ill. and she has a daughter she doesnt know, whom shes never known. the story is heartbreaking. Diana Ross is convincing, and the script is accurate. it may not be the best film about schitzophrenia, but as a view of the consequences, and the effects, it is well worth watching.

TV movie "Out of Darkness" allows us to experience the turns on Pauline Cooper's life, an afro-american Medicine student who at the height of her student life is caught by paranoid-schyzophrenia, at the age of 23. Action starts on a usual day of Pauline's life and takes the viewer to a critical phase on the character life. The story also shows us the daily struggle of living with someone who is not the owner of its own will, due to mental illness, and how it can affect an entire family. The movie most inspirational scenes are those of the attempts of Pauline to restart her normal life, after endless hospital treatments and experiences with new drugs to treat the disease. The most important message of the film is a kind of a tribute and a positive inspiration to all those who fight mental problems. Diana Ross put her movie career back on the track after several years without movie appearences (since "The Wiz" in 1978). Miss Ross wisely found this project and produced it trough her ANAID Film Productions as the perfect veycule for a movie comeback. One of the most interesting aspects of the movie is that Ross is not playing a singer (as usual), and does not contributes with songs to the soundtrack, making it a plain acting-ability show, reminding us that being one of the greatest show women alive, requires more than playing singers in trouble. "Out of Darkness" is also an open door to other drama projects by Diana Ross, leaving the viewer with high expectation for more projects starring Diana Ross on the so-called serious matters of life. It is also the evidence that Diana Ross is not the distant diva at all.