Toc Toc

Six people meet in the waiting room of a well-known psychologist. Each has come for a private session and they discover their appointments were all set for the same hour. Rather than leave, they decide to wait. Each has a different obsessive-compulsive disorder: fear of germs, scrupulosity, arithmomania, an obsession with symmetry, echolalia. One of them has Tourette syndrome. At first they cannot tolerate each other's behaviour, then they see they are fighting the same thing and start giving each other advice. By the time the doctor arrives it is done: they have formed their own group. The turn at the end is the point of the film: Federico, the one with Tourette syndrome, is Doctor Palomero himself. He arranges these meetings deliberately so that patients will support each other. Vicente Villanueva directed, from Laurent Baffie's stage play. Paco Leon, Alexandra Jimenez, Rossy de Palma and Oscar Martinez are in the cast, with Warner Bros. distributing. The title is a pun: toc is both the sound of knocking and the Spanish abbreviation for obsessive-compulsive disorder. It took 7.2 million dollars at the Spanish box office. Who it is for: viewers who like single-room comedies driven by dialogue. Who it is not for: anyone uneasy with mental illness as comic material. The film is sympathetic, but most of the jokes are built directly on the symptoms.