55 Steps (2018)

This movie tells two stories. The first is a legal drama based on the true story of Eleanor Riese, a psychiatric patient who, in the late 1980s, sued a San Francisco hospital for the right to refuse medication whose side effects she believed were harming her. The second is the story of the friendship that eventually grew out of her relationship with her lawyer, the patient’s rights attorney Colette Hughes.

The second of these two narratives — as brought to vivid life by the pair of fine actresses portraying Eleanor and Colette, Helena Bonham Carter and Hilary Swank — is the more stirring.

The drama of informed consent, which was then not the law for California mental patients, opens in 1985 with a phone call from Eleanor, then a patient at St. Mary’s Hospital, to a legal-aid hotline.  I have some ambivalence about this, as there is plenty that is portrayed here that is a challenge for modern psychiatric care, but it is a well told story.