Lilith

Vincent, back from the war, takes a job as a therapy worker at a private asylum for wealthy patients. He is assigned to a young woman named Lilith. She is bright, magnetic and living inside a language she invented herself, and Vincent moves from trying to understand her to trying to save her to trying to keep her, with the boundary dissolving the whole way. It was Robert Rossen's last film. What separates it from its contemporaries is that the illness is not the only subject. The weakness of the caregiver is too. The therapist here is not the one doing the healing, he is the one being pulled. Warren Beatty and Jean Seberg lead. Gene Hackman appears in a small part in his first film role, and Peter Fonda plays another patient. Neither critics nor audiences responded on release and the reappraisal came later. It is still demanding: slow, occasionally too lyrical, and open to argument for presenting mental illness as a mysterious allure. Who it is for: admirers of 1960s psychological drama. Who it is not for: viewers who want a diagnosis and a resolution.