Eternal Beauty manages a rare feat of portraying mental illness in such a way that it does not condescend to it, and through Sally Hawkins’s remarkable performance, it offers a full portrait of an individual with the disorder. The plot itself is rather mundane, but the richness of the performances and the talent of director/writer Craig Roberts lift this above the fray.

We first meet Jane (Sally Hawkins) walking through her neighborhood toward her apartment. She wears an oversize beige coat the same color as the buildings around her. Small and slight, with wide eyes and unkempt blond hair, she stops at a phone booth where the telephone is ringing. She composes herself and moves on. We learn that the phone call is from her fiancé who jilted her at the altar some 20 years ago and whom she still calls. We also learn that this isn’t really happening, that she’s imagining it. Jane has schizophrenia and has been struggling with it for decades. Sometimes she takes her pills. Sometimes she doesn’t. When this happens, the film does not flinch on the damage the illness and medication have caused her, even during her most lucid moments. 

Lest you think this is a downer, there’s a sly sense of humor throughout, such as when Jane presents wrapped Christmas gifts to her family when she arrives at her parents’ home and asks them to give them back to her. After unwrapping them and acting surprise and grateful, she then hands them the receipts so they know how much to pay her back. Or when she picks up her young nephew from school, unbeknownst to his parents. While driving and chatting with him, she slams on the breaks. The nephew hits the dashboard and is briefly knocked unconscious, and Jane’s reaction as she continues driving is to reach over and buckle him in. It’s dark humor and it works.

Eventually, she finds love with Mike (David Thewlis), who also has a mental illness, but he functions more socially than Jane. He is utterly smitten and devoted to her and gives her the boost of confidence she needs to stand up to her family. But even that does not bring her happiness. 

The film is less about Jane’s mental illness as it is about her family dynamics, and these are screwed up. The mother is a repressed controlling nightmare, her dad can do no more than stand and hold his head down in her presence, sister Alice (Alice Lowe) is passively stuck in a loveless marriage, and the other sibling is a raging narcissist.

Roberts uses a lot of visual tricks to get us into Jane’s mind and point of view: the usual whispers and pitched sounds when a filmmaker wants to depict someone hearing voices. But he’s smarter when he becomes more specific. Jane has drilled a hole into the wall of her living room, and when she wants to see her past self, she looks through it. There’s a lovely bit where she is pressed against the wall and it seems to move into another dimension.

What Roberts and Hawkins most convey is not just empathy, that is easy enough, but the truth that Jane is a complete person and not her disease, which should be obvious, but time and time again, films like Patch Adams (1998) or Cosi (1996) fail to portray this. Mind you, Eternal Beauty doesn’t glorify or soften mental illness, rather it contextualizes it is as part of the human experience. That, in itself, is a gift.