Step 1: Get ready for a trippy ride. The indie drama Altered Minds examines what happens when siblings, who have gathered to spend some time with their dying father, uncover some deep-seated family secrets. It moves almost too slowly through the family dynamics but culminates with a heart-wrenching punch in the gut.
Step 2: Bring a blanket. Altered Minds‘ setting places us in the depths of winter — gray, dreary and very cold – which sets a specific tone for the film. As the Shellner family reunites in their drafty family home, we meet the patriarch, Dr. Nathaniel Shellner (Judd Hirsch), a famed psychiatrist, his wife (Caroline Lagerfelt) and their adult children, including his natural-born son, Leonard (Joseph Lyle Taylor), and his two adopted children, Harry (C.S. Lee) and Julie (Jaime Ray Newman). We find out Nathaniel once worked for the CIA to help try to rehabilitate soldiers suffering from PTSD, and when he traveled to certain war-torn areas, he found his adoptive children, who had witnessed the horrific deaths of their parents at young ages.
Step 3: Think deep thoughts. The only one missing is adopted son Tommy (Ryan O’Nan), twin brother to Julie, because he’s currently roaming the neighborhood with a shovel trying to find where his dad buried an urn containing Tommy’s dead dog. Yes, Tommy has major OCD issues, and when he finally does show up to the family home, he is more than a little distraught. Eventually, Tommy jump starts the action when he accuses his father of doing psychological experiments on him when he was little, which basically triggers the other siblings to begin remembering things on their own. Then, Altered Minds becomes a did-he-or-didn’t-he? scenario, in which layers are peeled back on what Nathaniel’s real job was back in the day and truths are exposed. It’s a mind trip, to say the least.
Step 4: Get Judd Hirsch. Clearly, indie filmmaker Michael Z. Wechsler scored a big coup getting Hirsch for the film because the veteran actor adds gravitas to the proceedings and handles the chores with aplomb. As the dying Nathaniel (his cough sounds just awful in this), Hirsch must deliver long monologues about his past, along with trying to show how much he cares for his children. There are shades of the psychologist he played in Ordinary People; Hirsch just has those right soothing tones, except in Altered Minds, they are interrupted by that horrid cough.
Step 5: Try to find the character. Altered Minds keeps the narrative compelling as you try to figure out if Nathaniel is a monster or not, but there are moments when the film loses some of its cohesiveness, mostly with the Tommy character. He’s a little all over the place, and O’Nan tends to overdo it with the wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth. First, he’s manic, asking his father over and over where the urn is. Then he seems to believe Nathaniel that it’s all in his head, but then goes right back to crazy town. As his siblings, Newman and Taylor aptly react to Tommy’s meltdown, with Newman’s Julie trying to calm her brother down, and Taylor’s Leonard exasperation at his younger brother’s antics. Lee (who is recognizable as Dexter‘s Vince Masuka) also does a nice job with Harry, an orchestra violinist suffering from stage fright. When he starts to put things together, Lee’s descent into depression is effective.
Step 6: Feel it. Wechsler seems to have a handle on the slow-burn technique. Altered Minds looks crisp and well-crafted. There’s a dream-like quality to the film, leaving you to wonder whether some scenes are real or is just being imagined, which, at times, is distracting. At one point, for example, Tommy cuts open his head in the bathroom to look for microchips, comes out with divots in his head, but the rest of the family doesn’t even register it. Although you might be impatient for things to get going, once they do, you’re clenching your teeth. Definitely bundle up if you’re watching Altered Minds on VOD and stay for the psychologically trippy ending.