Brain on Fire

Susannah Cahalan, a reporter at the New York Post, starts having symptoms nobody can explain: numbness, memory loss, paranoia, seizures. The tests show nothing and the diagnosis drifts toward psychiatric illness. Eventually the neurologist Souhel Najjar identifies it: anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis, her immune system attacking her brain. Treatment works. Gerard Barrett directed, from Cahalan's memoir of the same name. Chloe Grace Moretz plays Susannah, with Jenny Slate, Tyler Perry, Carrie-Anne Moss and Richard Armitage in the cast. It is a Canadian, Irish and American co-production, shot in Vancouver from July 2015. It premiered at Toronto in September 2016 and went up on Netflix in June 2018, before being removed in June 2025. The reviews were severe. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 13 percent and Metacritic at 34. The closing text gives one number: Cahalan was the 217th person diagnosed with the condition, and her book has since helped thousands worldwide get the right diagnosis. Who it is for: viewers interested in stories of undiagnosed illness and in medical accounts. Who it is not for: anyone expecting the film itself to be good. The great majority of critics found it a failure that does not do the story justice.