Hysterical! is a wonderfully unusual production; it is equal parts personal, informative, and entertaining. Rebecca Buckle’s comedy lecture brings an important perspective to the long, troubling, and absurd history of hysteria, and sheds light on its modern-day consequences.
Hysteria is a difficult subject to handle well, but Buckle and director, Mina Barber, manage to find a good balance between the ‘hilarious’ aspects of its history and the seriousness of its implications. The history is at times ridiculous, even funny, but its consequences, the suffering the concept of ‘hysteria’ caused and continues to cause, are not. Buckle never loses sight of this and is able to lean into the more comic moments without undermining the gravity of the issue.
The film highlights how a long history of belief in ‘hysteria’, a diagnosis mostly levelled at women, continues to endanger women’s health today. Throughout the film, Buckle’s personal experiences of being patronised, disbelieved, and ignored by doctors for years intercut her lighthearted lecture with black and white flashbacks to GP appointments. Whilst at first these cuts can be a little jarring, due to the dramatic switches in tone, they ultimately give the history the real personal context which makes Buckle’s telling of it so effective.
