
Boy Interrupted
Evan Perry was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at age five and died by suicide at fifteen, jumping from the window of his family's New York apartment in 2005. His parents, filmmakers Dana and Hart Perry, built this film from home videos they had shot throughout his childhood, layering that footage against interviews with family, friends, and the doctors who treated him over a decade of medication changes and hospitalizations. The home movies show a bright, funny kid alongside the manic episodes and the crushing depressions that followed them, so the disorder is visible on screen rather than described secondhand. The film traces the family's search for a diagnosis and treatment that worked, the periods that looked like progress, and the warning signs that only make sense in hindsight. Dana Perry, an HBO producer by trade, turns the camera on her own house rather than someone else's tragedy, and that closeness is what gives the film its weight. It ends without tidy answers about what could have been done differently.