When most people think of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, they imagine extreme cleanliness, organization, or checking locked doors and oven knobs. While these are certainly symptoms associated with OCD, the reality is much broader. OCD is a mental disorder characterized by intrusive thoughts that become obsessions, driving the person to compulsive behavior in order to resolve them. I’ve spent most of my life with unwanted thoughts about my own inadequacies that have caused many dangerous compulsions — but didn’t recognize them as symptoms of OCD because they didn’t fit the commonly discussed definition.
Lauren Hadaway’s film The Novice shows an alternative form of OCD, exploring the dangerous toll all-consuming obsession can take on the body. Without ever mentioning the disorder by name, we watch as Alex Dall (Isabelle Fuhrman) nearly tears herself apart to combat intrusive thoughts of failure.
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Dall is a college freshman taking Novice Rowing for PE credit. She’s never rowed before and doesn’t even wear the proper clothes to her first class. During student introductions, her coach makes a statement that begins to spiral in Dall’s brain: it’s traditionally very hard to work up from Novice to the varsity rowing team. She fixates on this challenge and uses it as a way of quieting thoughts about her own failures. When she hears her coach praise another novice rower with the words “natural athlete,” the compliment rings on a constant loop in her head. Knowing he would never use those words to describe her, she becomes obsessed with achieving the 10,000 hours he claims it takes to become an expert.
Dall is not a natural rower. She’s small and doesn’t have the physical build that lends itself to the sport. But rowing perfectly aligns with her OCD, providing a dangerous combination of relief and challenge. Rowing is repetitive, a compulsive motion she can use as a focal point while ignoring everything else. To achieve the correct technique, her coach teaches her the mantra “legs, body arms, arms, body, legs.” Combined with the motions it describes, this pattern creates a compulsive ritual that drowns everything else out, including the limitations of her body.
I always thought the voices in my head telling me I wasn’t good enough were something everyone experienced. One of the many unhealthy ways I used to quiet them was extreme exercise. Every day I would wake up at 4:00 AM, go on a run, then follow it with weight lifting or yoga. On weekends, I would extend my workouts. If I overslept or missed a day, I would feel a dull panic growing inside until I could figure out a way to “make up” the workout. I pushed myself through injuries, I ran in the pouring rain, I walked on dangerous paths in pitch black darkness because the horror of what my brain would tell me if I skipped my routine was worse than anything that might happen to my body.
Watching Dall push herself is the closest I’ve ever felt to watching the inside of my brain. When I watch The Novice, I hear the voices in my own head, telling me to work harder and insisting that no matter what I do I’ll never be good enough. Dall decides to row an extreme time trial every day, taking additional classes and skipping holidays with her family to get in additional practice. She lies about her level of experience so that she can take boats out on the water alone, putting herself in danger to get closer to her goal.
During her first regatta, Dall catches what’s known as a crab, a mistake on the water. She loses control of her oar and it smacks her in the face, bloodying her nose. She says she couldn’t feel her legs and the oar slipped out of her hand. No one blames her for the loss, but Dall retreats to the restroom where she screams and hits herself, punishing her body for a lack of physical perfection. It’s her first rowing injury and the first time we see her engage in outright self-harm, but it will not be the last.
This image of the crab is one that continues throughout the film. To illustrate Dall’s worsening mental condition, Hadaway shows the large crustacean in a pot of water, slowly warming until it is boiled alive. Dall’s downward spiral has a similar trajectory. What begins as an admirable dedication to improvement gradually escalates to dangerous levels. During her first practice with the varsity team, she passes out while rowing and loses control of her bladder, her body fully shutting down. She develops a blister on the palm of one hand that becomes infected when she refuses to rest. Her body is revolting, yet she refuses to listen.
Dall’s brain tells her to keep pushing herself well past her body’s physical limits. She begins engaging in self-harm to punish herself for these natural boundaries. After losing an important race, Dall mirrors the crab, sitting naked in the bathroom next to a tub of steaming water. She methodically slices the side of her torso with scissors, speeding up as the blood begins to run down her hips. She rubs liniment on her clearly infected forearm and pours mouthwash on the weeping blister. The music begins to blur as Dall grows faint with infection and pain, but even then she refuses to rest.
The story’s final act involves an annual race around the college’s lake. The second Dall hears there’s a record to beat, she becomes obsessed, interrupting practice with demands to know the fastest time then pushing her teammates out of the way to sign up. Her race begins in the pre-dawn hours as a storm rolls in across the water. The girls are under strict orders to return to the boat house if they see lightning so they won’t get electrocuted in the metal vessels, but Dall refuses. She keeps racing, knocking herself and others out of their boats in her all-consuming determination to clock the fastest time. Dall rows through the jagged lightning, putting herself in danger to achieve a time no one else cares about.
After crossing the finish line, Dall returns to the boat house. As her team stares in silence, she writes her time on the board then immediately erases it. She strips off her team jersey revealing the toll this obsession has taken on her body; the scars on her torso and the infection now spreading all the way up to her shoulder. Dall drops the jersey on the floor and walks out. We never find out whether or not she’s beat the record.
The tragedy of The Novice is that Dall doesn’t seem to have learned anything. Her intrusive thoughts of failure have not gone away; she’s just found a way to temporarily shut them off. The final shot of the film sees Dall look directly into the camera, seeming to ask, “What’s next?” She may be done with rowing, but as soon as another challenge comes along, she will likely dive again headfirst into obsession. All we know for sure is that she has not found a way to deal with her brain’s compulsive need for perfection. And some day, she may push herself past the point of no return.