Anxious Nation

Anxious Nation is a documentary about the mental health crisis amongst young people in America. It talks to a dozen or so kids and young adults and their parents about what it’s like.

This is a well-meaning piece trying to address an important topic. The age of social media has not been great for our collective mental health, and it’s been demonstrably more destructive for young people. The causes and effects and resolutions are myriad, all with their benefits and drawbacks. And the expression of those issues cover an incredible range, from the extreme to the small and internal. It could fill a whole multi-season television show.

But this movie tries to tackle it in 100 minutes, and dear god, what a freaking mess. For one, it’s the worst kind of documentary. It’s full of talking heads looking slightly off the to sides of the screen, relaying conversations they had or things they thought or whatnot. We’ll often get snippets of public domain cartoons underneath people talking, which may or may not kinda relate to what’s being said. Sometimes, it’s abstract or seemingly disjointed images which seem to be original, and we later learn were made by young people to represent what their anxiety feels like. There are a lot of experts using patronizing, childish metaphors to try to explain anxiety, or using the types of turns of phrase that are common in speeches from motivational speakers, such as “doing the anxiety”. It’s all very after-school special, except much longer.

The people they focus on most have the most extreme reactions. Melt downs and uncontrollable sobbing and outbursts. Which is fine; this is absolutely a component of people who suffer from anxiety. But if you’re trying to discuss the silent epidemic and its rise throughout society, you probably want to highlight the more subtle, insidious ways it works, and how it’s often 100% invisible to even their closest loved ones. You probably want to talk more about social media’s impact, and do so through the average person’s experience online instead of people with a few hundred thousand followers on TikTok. As it is, this doc completely whiffs its premise by presenting anxiety as something which causes big reactions, even as it’s trying to have people say the opposite. That’s the thing about a visual medium; if the images contradict the audio, your message becomes unclear at best, and the image wins out at worst.

What’s especially strange is the film opens with one of the director’s saying she wanted to make this in order to understand the world her own kid is struggling with. So why isn’t her kid our entry point? And if her kid didn’t wanna do it, which would be fair, why wouldn’t that translate over to picking another individual kid? The constant jumping between perspectives, and not just perspectives but issues, is disorienting. It makes it feel as if the film conflates anxiety, depression, OCD, and bullying. Maybe the jumping could work if it there was a clearer statement about what each person was focusing on. Instead, they just start talking, and it may eventually come out what their struggle(s) have been.

There’s just no focus, no drive, no build, nothing. It’s just people talking at you for way too long. And it’s not like there’s any great insight, or they’re telling you anything you don’t already know if you’ve encountered this issue in any form. It’s just a whole lot of nothing.

None of this is to minimize the difficulty of being someone with severe anxiety, or a parent to someone with it. Both sides are incredibly rough for different reasons. But turns out relaying that to camera does not make for a compelling or enlightening watch.

I bet this would have done well as a documentary short. In large part because being forced to make a bunch of cuts, which would naturally push them to focus it more.

But in it’s current form, this is a snore. Which is even more frustrating because it’s a very real and important topic. *sigh*