My Word Against Mine (2025), screened in the International Competition at the One World Festival, begins raw. People sit facing the camera, framed head-on, answering a psychiatrist we never see. The face occupies the center of the frame; the office disappears; what remains is speech, the wait between one sentence and the next. Sometimes the voices answer back.
Sometimes the patient interrupts their own thought, glances slightly to the side, and listens to something the film cannot reach. That is where the discomfort and the pain set in. The documentary refuses the haste of diagnosis and avoids forcing each experience into a closed clinical category.
At first, this may seem like care. Soon it weighs differently. By refusing to name, My Word Against Mine trades one kind of violence for another: classification disappears, but the fixed camera remains, facing an intimacy still unfolding, as if the persistence of the gaze could itself become a form of understanding.
Popular cinema spent decades turning this split into a fetish, from David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) to M. Night Shyamalan’s Split (2016). Not here. What appears on screen has nothing clever about it.
Maasja Ooms’ film begins with younger patients, some of them trying to manage the exposure with an almost automatic cordiality, that half-smile of someone still searching for a tolerable position in front of the camera. Then Ooms cuts to an older patient, and the air changes. The defensive lightness disappears. Weariness enters. When this woman says she no longer knows whether she will be able to go on living with the voices for much longer, the weight lies less in the statement itself than in the face that comes before it.
From that point on, hearing voices stops sounding like clinical curiosity and begins to carry the weight of an entire life. Formally, Ooms works within a narrow range. My Word Against Mine relies mostly on tight shots of interviews and therapy sessions, pressing in on faces until every tightening of the mouth, every flicker in the eyes, every silence between question and answer carries more meaning than the words themselves. Between these blocks come supporting images that try to give form to what the conversation cannot hold: rough sea, fog covering the city, blurred glass or mirrors.
The mirror returns more than once, insisting on that unstable border between what seems to come from outside and what has already taken shape within. Some of these images work. Others come too close to an exhausted repertoire of festival documentary imagery. Repetition gives the film structure, but it also impoverishes it.
The cinematography, meanwhile, is too precise not to raise suspicion. At times, the image feels overcontrolled: skin cut by the light, background dissolved, frame clean. Suffering begins to look too beautiful. This is not a simple problem. My Word Against Mine does not vulgarize pain through aestheticization; it would be unfair to say that, but the image cleans up too much of what is being said. Ooms wants to move closer without adorning. She does not always succeed.
The film’s strongest image, in any case, does not come from therapy itself. It comes from a riskier visual gesture. A patient sits before the light of a projector and sees, cast onto her own face, a small film of her face. Forehead, eyelids, nose, and mouth receive another version of themselves. It is not merely an illustrative duplication: the image clings and divides. The body becomes a screen, but also an obstacle; the image coincides and fails at the same time.
In a matter of seconds, the documentary finds a stronger form for dealing with division than it does in much of its clinical conversation. Late, but it finds it. There, the film’s form finally meets what it has been trying to think.
That is precisely why the scene is also more troubling. It is powerful because it exposes so much. My Word Against Mine gains one of its most memorable images, but at the cost of an uneven emotional exchange. Who controls this situation? Who gets to gather the meaning of this exposure first: the person being filmed or the film itself? The question does not disappear. It stays lodged in the scene.
The work of Brazilian psychiatrist Nise da Silveira serves as an ethical counterpoint here. Rather than extracting a truth, she created mediations: drawing, painting, modeling, the atelier. Art offered a form through which to pass. When My Word Against Mine turns to projections and other visual displacements, it breathes more freely.
The problem is its insistence on returning to the harsher method: patients’ faces held in the frame, hesitant speech converted into evidence. The camera remains when it should have already withdrawn.
There is something broader at stake: the experience of living with voices and presences that cannot easily be separated. The film touches upon that terrain, but it does not need to develop it further. Its strongest problem lies elsewhere: in the way it turns that fracture into procedure.
That is where the documentary truly becomes complicated. There is real merit in its refusal of sensationalism, but also too much confidence in the direct exposure of this pain. Ooms moves in very close. At times, closer than she should. The film wants to escape the typology of “cases”, and for the most part it does; yet, it keeps organizing its force around what it claims to avoid: suffering held before us for too long, from too near.
In the end, what remains is less the question of what these people hear than of what My Word Against Min does by listening to them. The image that returns is not the sea, nor the fog, nor even the mirror. It is that face crossed by another image of itself, never fully coinciding with it, suspended between appearing and enduring being seen.