Dirty Filthy Love (2004) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

Dirty Filthy Love is an offbeat romantic comedy about a man named Mark who has both Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and Tourette Syndrome, and is attempting to survive in the world after he loses his job and his wife. Given the nature of his OCD, Mark then focuses his obsessions on his estranged wife, stalking her constantly. His best friend sees the increasingly erratic behavior, but feels helpless and scared when he sees an occasional mind-boggling glimpse into Mark's troubled thought process.

At first, Mark doesn’t really know what’s wrong with him, only that his habits are not shared by the world. For example, he's terrified of sitting down too quickly, is compelled to take the stairs in a bizarre sequence, and tends to wash his hands until they bleed. With the additional strain of his divorce and unemployment, he is also starting to twitch uncontrollably, yelp like a dog, and swear out loud with alarming frequency. He is fortunate enough to be noticed by Charlotte, a woman who is dealing fairly successfully with her own OCD, and who runs a self-help group for her fellow sufferers. She recognizes the nature of Mark's mental state, integrates him into the group, and allows Mark to see that he is not alone in the world, because the group of colorful characters provides mutual psychological support to its members away from an outside world where their obsessions are ridiculed.

In dealing with these themes, it would be easy to be maudlin, or satirical, or condescending, but the script does none of that, or at least not much, simply because one of the co-authors suffers from OCD and was able to use his own experiences to ground the film in objective reality. In fact, if the film had stuck to OCD, I might declare it brilliant, but the author didn't choose to stick to the single problem that he knew well, instead opting to layer in Tourette as well. The character was just given too much psychological weight to bear in this story. His additional Tourette problem meant that he was wandering through genteel public places barking, twitching, and shouting "cunt". The other OCD sufferers in the film were able to appear more or less normal for long periods of time, despite their eccentricities, but Mark ended up behaving like one of those crazy street corner Jeremiahs who inhabit most large cities. If Mark had been more like the others in his group sessions, the script could not only have dealt less melodramatically with the individual character, but could also have allowed the author to stick closely to his own experiences and thus develop a more empathetic audience identification with the problems of OCD sufferers in general.

In general, I found this to be a good movie with a brilliant lead performance from Michael Sheen, but the character's combination of problems meant that every stranger treated him like a lunatic, and that tended to change his story from pathos to bathos. The script would have done more by doing less.