Going Home is a rare kind of short film – one that inhabits history and doesn’t let us forget the human cost of psychiatry’s evolution. It is a docu-drama that unfolds inside the walls of Leavesden Asylum, charting the deeply personal and often painful intersection between patients’ lived realities and the medical establishment’s changing, and sometimes deeply flawed, approaches from 1870 to 1970.
This film draws deep inspiration from the poem ‘Going Home’ and the book ‘Acts of Caring and Other Heroics, Stories from the Leavesden Asylum/Hospital, 1870 to 1995’.
Adam Marsdin, as Dr. T Clay Shaw, and Margaux Cambell, portraying Lilly Thomson, carry the emotional weight of this narrative with subtlety, guided by Brooks’s unflinching direction and Amanda Prosser’s intimate cinematography. The film’s style is deliberately restrained – no flashy edits, no dramatic excess – just an earnest, raw listen to voices long muted by stigma and silence.
‘Going Home’ is made up of carefully dramatized moments that let us see and feel the realty behind clinical words. The Doctor explains the asylum’s purpose as a place of refuge for people with mental health issues, not a prison, though Lily feels it is like one, with high walls and locked gates. She was committed after giving birth to a child and being rejected by her family, who considered her mentally ill due to postpartum melancholia and hysteria. The narrative power comes through the almost tactile sense of confinement, isolation, and hope threaded throughout Lilly’s story, which represents countless untold stories.
Beyond being a history lesson, the film aims to track the progress in mental health care. The film’s refusal to sugarcoat history, paired with its compassionate gaze, is a necessary reminder that progress is neither linear nor complete.
This short is for anyone seeking a thoughtful, unvarnished look at mental health’s past and its echoes in the present. Brooks’s ‘Going Home’ is brave, informative, tender, and impossible to ignore.
