[VIFF 2020] REVIEW: ‘The Reason I Jump’, a sensory-immersion documentary on autism

© The Reason I Jump Ltd 2020

When I encounter movies like The Reason I Jump, I go back to what’s perhaps a time-worn quote from Roger Ebert:

“For me, the movies are like a machine that generates empathy. If it’s a great movie, it lets you understand a little bit more about what it’s like to be a different gender, a different race, a different age, a different economic class, a different nationality, a different profession, different hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears.”

A film from experienced documentarian Jerry Rothwell, The Reason I Jump sets itself a daunting challenge: immerse the viewer in an audio-visual approximation of autism, specifically the non-verbal kind. But the film is not merely the result of a “neurotypical” filmmaker imposing his own outsider perspective; the doc is adapted from a 2007 book of the same title by Naoki Higashida, a young Japanese man who is diagnosed with severe autism. Higashida’s book is seen as a revolutionary work, the first-person account of living with a condition that would otherwise make it extraordinarily difficult to communicate.

Rothwell breaks the film into segments following five young people diagnosed with nonspeaking autism, living in India, the U.K., the U.S. and Sierra Leone. Stitching these segments together is narration adapted from a translation of Higashida’s book, voiced by Jordan O’Donegan and overlaid on footage of a young Japanese boy exploring his environment. But it’s the movie’s sound design and editing that makes you take notice; to try to replicate how autistic people process the world, amplifying and fixating on certain details, the filmmakers use extreme close-ups and precise, overwhelming sound mixing. The real experience of autism may well remain beyond what movies can convey, but this is the closest I’ve seen any project come.

The documentary is also an example of the trust that Rothwell developed with his subjects and their families. Joss, the young man living in the U.K. is at a stage where he’s navigating puberty as well as autism. This manifests as occasional crises, where Joss lashes out physically at his parents. The camera captures some of this, suggesting that Joss’s parents knew that Rothwell wouldn’t use the footage for sensationalistic purposes.

The empathy machine also kicks in for the family and educators supporting the film’s subjects. We watch as the parents of Emma and Ben patiently hold up alphabet boards as the two friends spell out sentences letter by letter. As they do so, subtitles guide us along, displaying each letter in turn and smoothly organizing them into the messages that Emma and Ben want to impart to the audience. It’s impossible not to reflect during these scenes about what you’d do on either side of this exchange, parent or child.

Considering that we’re slowly seeing more depictions of autism on streaming services - Netflix’s Atypical and Love on the Spectrum come to mind - The Reason I Jump feels like a natural acquisition by one of these platforms. There’s no grand call to action here, other than opening your mind and changing your perspective. Let’s keep that machine running.

The Reason I Jump gets three stars out of four.