Understanding Aggression

Directed by Margaret Thomson

This eye-opening drama-doc, set in a psychiatric hospital, was used to train student nurses and tells us much about evolving attitudes to mental illness. A progressive training tool in its time, it still feels sincere but also sensible and silly in about equal measure. The clinical need to clarify vies with the cinematic need to dramatise, reaching a feverishly literal extreme in scenes of a paranoid schizophrenic being pursued by a giant eye…