Lost in My Mind
2024 · 13m · United States
Directed by Charles Frank
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
A young man with obsessive-compulsive disorder gives a candid account of his daily life and his experiences with exposure therapy.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the vulnerable first-person OCD doc to be either clinical catharsis or inspiration porn—Frank refuses both, which is almost interesting, but the film still lands in exactly the middle where consensus lives.
The formal restraint here—letting the subject's candor do the heavy lifting rather than leaning on score or montage—places it squarely in the tradition of essayistic self-documentation, though it doesn't quite find its own syntax within that lineage.
The decision to let silences and Frank's own pauses carry the weight of processing—rather than filling them with explanatory narration or therapeutic resolution—is what makes the 13 minutes feel like actual time spent in someone's head, not a packaged narrative.