Heightened

Failing to be able to concentrate and unable to tolerate any sound or slight distraction from nail tapping to people smacking their jaws, chewing food, and crunching their pencils, Eleanor, who prefers to be called Nora (Sara Friedman), cannot finish or pass the bar exam. When she literally sounds the fire alarm for help during an attempt to take the bar exam, she encounters a mental breakdown, albeit she seems to think there’s nothing wrong with her behavior. Riddled with extreme social anxiety and OCD, she is driven to a bizarre emotional edge. As writer, director, and lead actress, Sara Friedman’s mission for Heightened is understood.

Inordinately pale and very obstinate, Nora returns to her childhood Maine home to live with her emotionally distant parents, Susan (Sarah Clarke) and Mitch (Xander Berkeley), due to her extremely disruptive behavior. She must take part in a program and court-ordered psychiatric treatment with a very interesting therapist, Dr. Jha (Dipti Mehta). Though she expresses and feels her group sessions are very beneath her mental capacity and perhaps her social stature, her therapist is clear in the direction of Nora’s need for help.

Set on a new path not of her choosing, Nora is assigned to fulfill her program, volunteering at a local state park on the coast of Maine, where she primarily collects trash. A very machismo environment clearly set by her supervisor Mitch (Mike Mitchell) and awkward assignment end up helping Nora and her anxiety issues, especially as she bonds with her new supervisor Dusty (Dave Register), who has his own crippling issues that place him as an outcast, much like Nora.

“…Nora is assigned to fulfill her program, volunteering at a local state park on the coast of Maine.”

Although Heightened is not an actively dramatic film, it is about a dramatic subject served with deadpan humor much in the vein of a Wes Anderson film but with great attention to detail and extremely interesting camera angles that provide a metaphor for being left-of-center and an outcast, providing an interesting foundation to Nora’s journey to a recovering she does not think is necessary, but it is.

Heightened provides perspective on failure, overachieving, and the inability to live to others’ standards, which Nora’s parents, mostly her socially obsessed mother, have thrust upon her, which she does not care for or wish to embrace. However, Nora changes and decides to provide her study practices as a method to help Dusty. Yet, Nora’s issues have much more to do with her mother than anything else.

Heightened wraps up in a neat and tidy bow, which is very much inferred except for some details on why people treat each the way they do. For such extreme issues and serious problems, it’s a light-hearted approach to dealing with social behaviors that disrupt life for many without going to deep.