Editorials

Finding Empathy in ‘The Young Poisoner’s Handbook’

September 19th, 2023 | By K. Thor Jensen

Early on in Benjamin Ross’s The Young Poisoner’s Handbook, prodigal schoolboy-slash-scientist Graham Young undertakes an experiment. Allegedly done by Isaac Newton, the application of heat and pressure is supposed to transform a toxic element into a shimmering diamond. But Graham’s attempt goes wrong, shattering his flask in an explosion of sulfite sparks. 

This, along with a casual interest in typically disgusting British pornography, sets Graham on the course of murdering his family and friends through heavy metal poisoning.

But who among us hasn’t caused pain trying to make something beautiful?

I first saw The Young Poisoner’s Handbook at the 1995 Seattle International Film Festival. I was 19 years old. 

SIFF is known as an “audience festival” instead of an “industry festival.” This is not where filmmakers go to make deals but rather to get their movies in front of an appreciative and diverse audience. Alien premiered there in 1979. Ghost World did the same in 2001. It’s as likely to program Euro arthouse as to screen gory horror. And it’s pretty easy to get tickets.

And 1995 was my first year attending. I had just graduated high school the previous summer. I moved out of my mother’s house the day I turned 18 into a rickety Victorian with seven other roommates atop Capitol Hill, next to radio towers that fed a constant buzz into every speaker and pair of headphones for blocks. 

It was my first festival ever, and I pored through the listings trying to pick just five movies out of the hundreds in competition to see, based on my meager salary working nights at the phone company opening and sorting non-standard mail. I was no cinephile — just flying blind, experimenting, hoping for a transcendent experience.

Of all the movies I saw that year, The Young Poisoner’s Handbook stuck with me the most (sorry, Gamera: The Guardian Of The Universe). It has a lot going for it — a restrained absurdity, compelling production design, and a kick-ass mod soundtrack. The fact that it was pretty hard to find for a while afterward definitely helped. A movie you have to describe fuzzily has a lot more power than one you can summon at will.

But the most compelling part of the movie was the character of Graham himself. His detachment from the horrific acts he was committing gives the film its emotional power and its grim humor. It’s an amazing performance by Hugh O’Conor, who plays Graham from his early teens to his mid-twenties and somehow pulls it off.

His portrayal is compelling in how much it leaves out. Graham’s experiments on friends and family members are conducted bloodlessly for weeks. He keeps a journal tracking their doses and symptoms. And although a few of the killings are made as revenge for social slights, there’s no justification for them. He flares up briefly when bullied or tormented and then becomes an impassive mask. Whether it’s among schoolmates or co-workers in the camera factory he works at after being discharged from the mental hospital, Graham simply never connects to them as human beings.

I couldn’t help feeling a sense of recognition.

I’ve always had problems expressing my emotions in a socially acceptable way. As a young boy, I would cry at bizarre times, prompted by mysterious moods. I also had difficulty connecting with people on their level, preoccupied with esoteric subjects like robots or songbirds. As a teenager, I felt detached from other people, unable to connect with them despite their best efforts. When somebody touched me out of kindness, my entire body would twitch.

In 2023, I understand those feelings a little better. Now, I know that I have autism. 

It was hard to be on the autism spectrum in the early 1990s. Rain Man had come out in 1988 and shifted the public consciousness; now, audiences thought of people with autism as doddering, non-social supercomputers. Not all of us can perform rapid-fire calculations or Jeopardy–winning feats of recall. Instead, it just makes many of us uncomfortable almost all the time.

But the thing about autism is that it doesn’t take your emotions away. Instead, it just makes it difficult — and sometimes impossible — to understand them in the context of the world. Graham has the same needs and desires as any teenager. He just can’t express them or process people’s reactions to them. That’s how I felt as well. When you try your best to fit in, and it doesn’t work, you feel even more isolated.

It also makes you angry. I’ve struggled with anger my whole life — at myself, at peers, at the crushing systems that violate us every day. When that anger is released, it’s like a tsunami. It sweeps over me and drags me under.

In many ways, Graham’s experiments were a very different autistic form of revenge. He didn’t explode like a volcano. Instead, he burned constantly and slowly, taking the pain he felt out on the world, one drop of poison at a time. Instead of being dragged under, he spent his whole life not breaking the surface. His murders allowed him to impose his will on a world he didn’t understand and couldn’t fit into. 

What does it feel like to have that cold fire burning inside you and let it out?

I never found out. But others did. In 2005, a teenage girl in Shizuoka, Japan, was arrested for dosing her mother’s meals with thallium over the course of several months, recording her decline as Graham does in the movie. She impersonated a medical student to get the poison from a pharmacist and blogged about her mother’s illness before police caught her. In her blog, she’d spoken fondly of watching the film.

I didn’t poison anybody after watching The Young Poisoner’s Handbook. Instead, I started the laborious process of draining the poison out of myself. Forcing myself to make eye contact with people as I talked to them. Being mindful of my tone. Developing an understanding of other people’s experiences and emotions.

It took a long time. And now, watching the movie again with my 15-year-old autistic son, it all comes back to me. I look over at him, watching him. Carefully. I can’t help but see myself in him — that’s what parenting is — and hope I can spare him the same experiences. 

Was there a way to spare Graham Young that suffering? The real Graham Young was a monstrous neo-Nazi, so probably not. But empathy is one of the most important tools to develop as an autistic person, so maybe watching The Young Poisoner’s Handbook can help build something crystalline and beautiful in his wounded young heart.