Best movies like Children of Darkness
A unique, carefully handpicked, selection of the best movies like Children of Darkness Starring Peter Thomas, Richard Kotuk, John Brooks, Billy Calhoun, and more. If you liked Children of Darkness then you may also like: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Neverwas, Another Happy Day, A Beautiful Mind, Boogeyman 2 and many more popular movies featured on this list. You can further filter the list even more or get a random selection from the list of similar movies, to make your selection even easier.
A significant number of American children and teenagers - from all social backgrounds - suffer from mental disorders, schizophrenia, autism and emotional problems, leading them to isolation from society while treating their issues in mental health facilities. But there's no end in sight for those young individuals when they face obstacles and mistreatment in inadequate places under the supervision of careless and inexperienced professionals. The documentary follows some of those public mental institutions and another private center dealing with troubled kids and reveals what's wrong with their procedures, and the irreparable harm they cause in those patients.
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Neverwas
Zach Riley is a psychiatrist, who leaves a job at a prestigious university, to take up a job at the privately run mental institution, Millwood. What he doesn't reveal at the time of his appointment is that this was the very place where his novelist father, T.L. Pierson, spent many years of his life.
Another Happy Day
A wedding at her parents' Annapolis estate hurls high-strung Lynn into the center of touchy family dynamics.
A Beautiful Mind
John Nash is a brilliant but asocial mathematician fighting schizophrenia. After he accepts secret work in cryptography, his life takes a turn for the nightmarish.
Boogeyman 2
A young woman attempts to cure her phobia of the boogeyman by checking herself into a mental health facility, only to realize too late that she is now helplessly trapped with her own greatest fear.
Hunger Point
A woman struggles with her self-image in a house run by a weight-obsessed mother, alongside a younger sister whose eating disorder has tragic coincidences.
Clean, Shaven
Peter Winter is a young schizophrenic who is desperately trying to get his daughter back from her adoptive family. He attempts to function in a world that, for him, is filled with strange voices, electrical noise, disconcerting images, and jarringly sudden emotional shifts. During his quest, he runs afoul of the law and an ongoing murder investigation.
Shutter Island
World War II soldier-turned-U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels investigates the disappearance of a patient from a hospital for the criminally insane, but his efforts are compromised by troubling visions and a mysterious doctor.
Girl, Interrupted
Set in the changing world of the late 1960s, Susanna Kaysen's prescribed "short rest" from a psychiatrist she had met only once becomes a strange, unknown journey into Alice's Wonderland, where she struggles with the thin line between normal and crazy. Susanna soon realizes how hard it is to get out once she has been committed, and she ultimately has to choose between the world of people who belong inside or the difficult world of reality outside.
Sling Blade
Karl Childers, a mentally disabled man, has been in the custody of the state mental hospital since the age of 12 for killing his mother and her lover. Although thoroughly institutionalized, he is deemed fit to be released into the outside world.
David and Lisa
Teenager David Clemens develops a hysterical fear that he will die if he comes into physical contact with another person. Perturbed, David's overbearing mother places him in a home for mentally disturbed young people, but David remains withdrawn from the other patients and his psychiatrist. Over time, however, David grows interested in 15-year-old Lisa, who suffers from multiple personalities – one who can only speak in rhyme, and the other, a mute.
It's Kind of a Funny Story
A clinically depressed teenager gets a new start after he checks himself into an adult psychiatric ward.
What About ME?
Inside the dramatic search for a cure to ME/CFS (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome). 17 million people around the world suffer from what ME/CFS has been known as a mystery illness, delegated to the psychological realm, until now. A scientist in the only neuro immune institute in the world may have come up with the answer. An important human drama, plays out on the quest for the truth.
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden
A disturbed and institutionalized 16-year-old girl struggles between fantasy and reality.
Manic
Follows the fate of Lyle, a violent adolescent who, in lieu of prison, is placed in a juvenile mental institution where he encounters a group of equally troubled teens. This motley crew - abused, sexually confused, violent, and yet hanging on by their grit and anger - becomes Lyle's last lifeline as he fights to find meaning in a world that seems to defy understanding.
Puzzle of a Downfall Child
Lou Andreas Sand, a once famous model, recalls her past as she tries to make success in the modeling world of New York, her stressfull workdays, her affair with Mark, an advertising executive, her friendship with photographer Aaron, and her downward spiral into ruin.
Short Term 12
Grace, a compassionate young supervisor at a foster care facility, helps at-risk teens. But when a new charge dredges up memories of her own troubled past, Grace's tough exterior begins eroding.
Fear Strikes Out
True story of the life of Jimmy Piersall, who battled mental illness to achieve stardom in major league baseball.
The Garden
A troubled young boy and his father on a road trip stumble upon a rural farm where the elderly owner has sinister plans for the both of them involving witchcraft and evil.
Anguish
A new girl in a quiet town, Tess tries to manage her psychosis while adjusting to her new life with her mom. After stumbling upon the shrine of Lucy, a hit and run victim, Tess finds herself overwhelmed by hallucinations of the dead girl and starts to question her sanity again. When the spirit possesses Tess’s mind and soul, mother and daughter are at a loss for where to turn next for salvation: religion or medicine? Both institutions have failed them to date but faith leads them to the house of Sarah, Lucy’s mother, who has been despondent since the accident. All together with time working against them, Sarah is desperate to believe that Lucy is still alive in Tess but neither parent wants to give up on their daughter. Now that she understands what is happening to her, ultimately Tess must decide whether she wants to keep fighting or succumb to her affliction.
Dancing In The Dark
Anna Forbes suffers an attack and sexual abuse by her father-in-law. But when she overcomes her fear and tells her husband Mark what happened he does not believe her, choosing instead to believe his father who denies everything. As Anna becomes increasingly desperate to be believed and her actions become more erratic, Mark has her committed to a mental institution for psychiatric treatment.
Some Voices
Schizophrenic Ray tries to adjust to the outside world after being released from an institution.
Painful Secrets
Dawn isn't like other kids her age full of typical teenage angst about boys, school and parents. Her pain goes far deeper, and to deal with her emotional overload she physically cuts herself. The problem of adolescent girls committing self-mutilation is very real, and this movie exposes the growing epidemic. It's a film you can't afford to miss.
Augusta, Gone
Martha is a businesswoman and divorced mother of two children - Augusta and Jack. However, when docile Augusta becomes a teenager, feelings of anger and self-hate cause her personality to undergo a scary transformation, and Martha realizes that this is not just typical teen angst. Augusta begins doing drugs, drinking, and ends up on the streets. Her concerned mother and father reach out to an educational consultant, who advises them to send Augusta to a strict wilderness camp for troubled teens. However, even the institution's experienced and tough administrators find Augusta a difficulty to keep under control. Martha comes to realize that there is no answer to her daughter's behavior.
Greystone Park
In October 2009, the filmmakers went into an abandoned psychiatric hospital to explore the 'haunted' institution, famous for its radical treatment of patients with mental illness. Electroshock, insulin therapy, and lobotomies were commonplace. Once inside, the filmmakers quickly discovered that they were not alone.
House of Dust
College students exploring an abandoned insane asylum accidentally shatter canisters holding the cremains of former mental patients. Inhaling the dusty ash filling the air, they're soon possessed by the souls once held within them. One is a convicted serial killer from 1950.
Crazy People
A bitter ad executive, who has reached his breaking point, finds himself in a mental institution, where his career actually begins to thrive with the help of the hospital's patients.
Crazywise
Western culture treats mental disorders primarily through biomedical psychiatry, but filmmakers Phil Borges and Kevin Tomlinson reveal a growing movement of professionals and survivors who are forging alternative treatments that focus on recovery and turning mental “illness” into a positive transformative experience.
Willowbrook: The Last Great Disgrace
A shocking exposé of the deplorable conditions and abuses from the Willowbrook State School for children with intellectual disabilities.
When Friendship Kills
Teenager Lexi Archer moves to Chicago with her newly divorced mother and befriends a popular girl at her new school, Jennifer. After Lexi's volleyball coach suggests that she lose weight, Jennifer reveals she is bulimic and the two girls decide to help each other, leading to disastrous consequences.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
A petty criminal fakes insanity to serve his sentence in a mental ward rather than prison. He soon finds himself as a leader to the other patients—and an enemy to the cruel, domineering nurse who runs the ward.