07/03/2023 - The documentary by Swedish-born director Marie Lidén is formally ambitious but light on insight

The plight of suffering from an illness whose very existence is still a matter of debate is at the centre of Electric Malady, a documentary released by Conic in UK theatres on 3 March, in which Swedish-born director Marie Lidén lets a man now in his forties talk about his life with electrosensitivity. Alone in the Swedish wilderness lives William, a once-promising musician who has been forced to retreat from city life, where the electronics and microwave radiation that most people are not affected by make him feel nauseous and dizzy. Even now, living in a wooden house with walls specifically designed to repel electronic waves, William describes feeling like his head is in a vice most of the time.

It’s a terribly sad situation, and seeing this grown man forced to walk around with a special blanket over his head is heartbreaking. Lidén also talks to his parents, who visit their son often and appear incredibly patient. But a lot of the film is concerned with the past, and they describe their initial reaction to William's illness in its early days as fraught, a mix of anger and frustration. Regret over all the time that has passed without William being able to do very much at all — electronics are pretty much in everything — permeates the film: it is a constant in William’s body language and his slow rhythm of speech, in his confessions to Lidén that he sometimes thinks of suicide, and conversely in the enthusiasm he can still muster when listening to a CD he likes. Talking to a friend who visits him every so often, William reminisces about how much he once achieved over the space of five years, compared to now. Lidén translates well to the screen the way time feels different for him, capturing the details of his slower existence but also evoking a kind of floating state with dreamy visuals of light piercing through the trees and people moving in slow motion, and a similarly dreamlike sound design. 

However, this loose aesthetic unfortunately extends to the delicate question of whether electrosensitivity is “real” or psychosomatic. Lidén only addresses this elephant in the room hesitantly, with just one doctor/expert who visits William contributing minimal information about the research around this fairly new illness. William explains that it was his girlfriend Maria who first got ill, and that they moved together to the countryside; we are later told that she is now married with children, but not whether this means that she is no longer suffering from electrosensitivity. Also mentioned in the film is a psychiatrist’s belief that William’s symptoms are a reaction to some childhood trauma, and a scene of his parents and sister insisting that his childhood was “like a fairy tale” does not feel like quite enough to entirely undermine the doctor’s claim — Lidén brings up these doubts, but gives us nowhere to put them. While this respectful approach is understandable in the context of a documentary about William and not about this as-yet-unrecognised illness, it does make for a rather repetitive and monotonous film, where a potentially more interesting documentary perhaps would not have taken sides. 

Electric Malady was produced by Aconite Productions Ltd.