I can’t think of any off the top of my head that are specifically about neurodiversity. It’s hard to find representation at all, let alone good representation. Most is inaccurate to the point of being harmful.

One movie I quite like is Thelma, a Norwegian spookythriller from 2017. Sort of like Carrie if you’re familiar with that book (and subsequent movie).

I could never really pick just one, but for the sake of discussion I will go with:

2005 Constantine with Keanu and Rachel Weisz.

The reason I am going with this is that its one of my all time favourites, but more importantly I had never thought to look at Constantine’s ability to see evil is like being divergent. His interaction with normies parallel those in the community although at a very different level and fictionalized.

John sees the world differently, reacts to it differently, prioritizes things differently, feels things differently, judges things differently. In the process he takes someone who has masked and rejected her differences and gets her to accept that she too is divergent.

I never connected these dots but I can see how the divergent part of me identified with this almost unconsciously.

Memento. Maybe something about bumbling through life a bit lost and not really knowing where you came from or where you are going and the way the filmmakers advance the story backwards through time. My notes and reminders are in my phone instead of on my body, but sometimes it really doesn’t feel so different. I am terrible at remembering things in chronological order so I love the unique utilization of time here. I also love a good mystery. The whole thing is top notch.

I am mostly a novelty seeker and rarely watch anything twice, but this is one I am always down to watch again whenever I come across it.

Oddly enough my favorite TV show, Dark, also is a mystery that has to do with time as a central theme.

I mostly pass on the Star Trek episodes with time shenanigans, however. I do think Data and Spock are such great characters. I don’t have autism so far as I know, but the whole “what does it mean to be human” exploration and struggle is still incredibly relatable.

I think the movie I admire the most is The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, because it’s just the most beautiful film I’ve ever seen. But in terms of my ADHD, it couldn’t be any further away from apt. It’s a glacially slow movie that’s damn near three hours long, so shouldn’t be able to hold my attention the way it does, but fuck me is it beautiful.

I sometimes bring up the last ten minutes of it on YouTube, and sink back into the familiar melancholy of Bob’s final years, wrapped up in the stunning score from Nick Cave.

Fisher King

The movie Wayne’s World was my very first ‘special interest’ that I became obsessed with. Especially Garth, who I really related to (and still do) and who is definitely neurodivergent if you ask me!

I wore out multiple VHS tapes of that movie as a youngster from watching it sooo many times. I still love that goofy-ass movie with all of my heart and I always will.

Scott Pilgrim vs the World. Somehow everytime I watch it, it sucks me into its world. The comics are better, but it’s much easier for me to rewatch this every year than the comics every few years.

One of the more recent movies that became a favorite for me is Everything Everywhere All At Once. It’s so strange yet relatable. The older I get and the more I learn, the less sense the world seems to make. The absurdity of it all becomes more apparent.

I love Mad Max: Fury Road. All of the visual storytelling, the world building through costume and vehicle designs, the shot compositions, the colors, the movements, the pacing, the fight choreography, it’s all just chefs kiss. I love the whole post-apocalpyse genre a lot but the worldbuilding in Fury Road is so layered and complex yet subtle. I notice new things every time I watch it.

I can’t pick only one. I’m going to go with (1) The Insider (1999) because I’m a stickler for whistleblower/legal dramas, plus I really like Al Pacino in the 90s (minus the godfather movie we don’t talk about,) and (2) 24-Hour Party People (2002) because of its humorous and stylistic portrayal of one of my favorite musical artists and one of music television’s most eccentric figures.

I’ll watch more or less anything within reason, except for musicals.

Memoria by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. It stars Tilda Swinton as a Scottish orchid farmer visiting her sister in Colombia. She’s woken one night by a loud BANG, a sound that then follows her, happening randomly, anywhere, inexplicable and out of her control. She pursues the source of the sound, and I’ll stop my description there.

Right now, for me, this is the greatest most sublime, magical work of art ever created, for maybe too many reasons to state here, and at any rate it’s best experienced than interpreted (of course, there’s a lot going on in it that is worth discussing, but it is so welcoming to fresh experience that it feels kinda crude to list off reasons why the movie should be seen… maybe I’m being silly lol). However, I do wanna talk a little about how I feel this is such a uniquely neurodivergent movie. It deals with experience, intangible fleeting experiences that we live with, that follow us and direct us. No one else hears the sound Jessica hears, only her, and it affects her sense of the world, history, and self. I’ve never resonated with a character more – her quiet, dogged curiosities and intense frictional dissociation are so familiar to me – how it makes her body move, how she navigates conversations, how she ruminates (I’ve never seen a film depict rumination so vividly!!), how she folds in on herself, and where it takes her, or what…

Sorry if this is overly obtuse, I really want to preserve the transcendent mystery of this movie and I can’t recommend it enough for neurodivergent folks. I tend to see Jessica as having ADHD, but there’s a comfort for me in the film not belaboring the label, but just presenting what the world is like for us, and the purpose lying out there for those like us.

Honorable mentions:

• Goodbye, Dragon-Inn by Tsai Ming-Liang
• Computer Chess by Andrew Bujalski
• The Trial by Orson Welles
• Playtime by Jacques Tati
• Perfumed Nightmare by Kidlat Tahimik

Avatar. The tall Smurf one, not the blue arrow tattoo one.

Given the other comment ITT about constantine, I suppose I love it for similar reasons, thematically.

Someone at odds with society finally meets kindred spirits and is freed from society entirely, finally able to live the life she always deserved, bonding with her new family in a way others could only imagine.

We should all be so lucky.

Mad Max: Fury Road. I’m a sucker for world building. And wow, this movie has so much world built in it. They invented a whole religion and prayers. There are badass grannies on custom dirt bikes. I’m not sure what else you could want in a movie.