OLIVIA – a film by Felipe Morell – SPOILERS ⁓

At the start, Janis (Sara Mitich) wakes from a dream full of fire and music. On her way downstairs, she stops to look at a photo on the wall (which might be of her husband’s family, but is never explained), then continues to the kitchen, where she takes medications left for her on a plate. She has some coffee, and goes to the garden shed to find her husband (Clayton Ledger played by Sebastian Spence), who asks what she remembers of the previous evening. “We ate dinner,” she tells him, “had tea, then I woke up outside in the cold with you with no memory of how I got there.” Clayton is a psychiatrist, and Janis is his patient as well as his wife. He believes Janis has Dissociative Identity Disorder.

The garden shed contains a Boracherro Tree (Brugmansia arborea), and Clayton routinely prepares a concoction from it. The plant is psychoactive and potentially deadly. It’s active ingredients are scopolamine, atropine, and hyoscyamine.

Clayton returns to the house and takes a phone call from Kai (Dianne Aguilar) and tells her he needs to delay his planned trip to New York. Kai is a former student of Clayton’s who thinks he’s writing his twelfth book on which he’s been given a huge advance and three extensions but has only submitted one chapter. Kai has just “lost her fiancé” (just how is not specified). She might lose her job if the book fails to materialize. From the garden, Janis overhears the conversation.

Janis has been expecting to travel with Clayton to New York, and is unhappy about the delay. Clayton brings her tea with honey which, she says, is a little bitter. Then he puts on Dvořák (Cello Concerto in B minor, Opus 104) and we meet Olivia, one of Janis’ alternate personas. “When Janis finds out about me and the others she’s gonna be so mad,” Olivia says and begins to play the cello along with the recording. She has a flashback to unpleasant experiences with her father and becomes manic. Clayton gives her a neck injection and puts her to bed.

The next morning, Kai arrives, ferried to the island by Angus (Gary Brennan) who delivers supplies once a week. Clayton seems surprised by Kai’s arrival. It is clear that Angus doesn’t like Clayton much.

Kai hasn’t been to the island before, so Clayton gives her a short tour of the place. “My great-grandfather bought the island,” he explains. “It’s been in my family for over 150 years. I built my house and moved over here for my writing.”

While her husband is occupied, Janis goes through the papers in his office and discovers that she is actually Olivia Deering, a music prodigy who disappeared at the age of eleven after her parents died. She also finds out that Olivia was suspected of setting the fire that caused her parents’ deaths, and that one of Clayton’s colleagues had described Olivia as being psychotic, narcissistic, paranoid, delusional, and dissociative, with “extreme” hallucinations.

Later, while Clayton and Kai are having sex, Janis takes the opportunity to have a look at Kai’s computer. She finds searches about herself and about the Borrachero Tree from which Clayton derives the drug he is using on her. She has a waking dream, and follows a hallucination of her younger self to the basement door. An alter who later identifies herself as Florian suggests that she and Clayton forego the usual evening tea (which she knows is drugged) and initiates loud aggressive sex with Clayton, intended to be heard by Kai.

Clayton says he has identified seven alters in Olivia. Florian would be number eight.

The following day, Kai decides to take a walk around the island and Janis insists on going with her, despite Clayton’s disapproval. Another alter comes out, says she’s 11 years old, and asks Kai’s help escaping from Clayton, though they might need to force Janis to go. “We know everything Janis does,” says eleven-year-old Olivia, “but sometimes we don’t want to know and we go away.” Then she tries to cut off her fingers with garden shears and Kai has to stop her.

Kai reports this incident to Clayton, who immediately calls Angus and tells him that Kai is ready to leave the following day. (Kai is not happy about this.) Clayton has a session with Janis, and tells that her experience with the garden shears was a hallucination. He puts on Dvořák again and Janis morphs into Olivia who tells him she’s scared of Janis and of him. Then he meets Florian for the first time, and she tells him “if you want to talk to Olivia, you have to go through me.”

Flashbacks experienced by Janis and her alters include images of her abusive parents, images of cello performances (often with a young Clayton in the audience), and images of fire.

Clayton’s family looms in the background. He explains to Kai that his obsession with Olivia Deering began when his mother sponsored the young cellist at the start of her career. He also mentions difficulties relating to his father. One wonders about that photo on the wall outside their bedroom that Janis ponders for a moment before Kai arrives.

Next morning, Kai tries to get Janis to leave with her but Janis insists on taking her cello along, and retreats to her basement practice room. The room appears to be an exact copy of her practice room at her parents’ house, as seen in her nightmares. Kai follows Janis into the basement and Clayton locks them in. After this, the story becomes increasingly non-linear. Events may not happen in their order of appearance, and probably should not be taken literally.

The thought creeps in that Kai might also be one of his patients, who thinks she’s his editor like Olivia thinks she’s his wife. One suspects that Olivia’s loss of her parents might have led to her illness, rather than being caused by it. One also suspects that Kai’s fiancé might have died in a fire, but these suspicions are never confirmed.

It is hard not to question Dr. Ledger’s motives. His basement contains a replica of Olivia’s practice room in her parents’ house, and it makes one doubt what he says about why he built the house on the island. and scopolamine administered by injection seems an unconventional treatment for Dissociative Identity Disorder. According to UK Addiction Treatment Centres: “While Scopolamine doesn’t necessarily enable the perpetrator to control the victim’s mind like a puppet master, the induced state of confusion and compliance can make the victim more susceptible to suggestion. This vulnerability, coupled with memory loss, creates a cocktail of conditions ripe for exploitation, date rape and violence.”

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OLIVIA can be purchased from Amazon Prime Video.