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Ne-Yo with special guest

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Jason Mraz and His SuperBand with special guest Monica Martin

Sponsor: Megan P. and John L. Anderson

August 3:

Elvin Bishop & Charlie Musselwhite

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Local Moviemaking

See beyond disability in The Unseen

From local studio Lakefront Pictures, the new horror film has an autistic creator and a disabled star—but first and foremost, it’s a classic supernatural thriller.

By NOAH BERLATSKY

Usually films about disabled characters highlight or focus on the disability. Movies like My Left Foot (1989), Scent of a Woman (1992), Hush (2016), and The Whale (2022) are about how disabled protagonists deal with, transcend, or are defined by cerebral palsy, deafness, blindness, or immobility. The audience is, in general, presumed to be mostly composed of non-disabled people who are at the film, in part, to see how disabled people live. The goal is to display disabled lives so that people can be informed, inspired, or disgusted by what they learn.

The Unseen , a supernatural thriller from Lakefront Pictures, takes a different approach. The film is about a young lawyer, Tommy Olson, who starts out his career investigating a mysterious car crash, only to uncover more than he wanted to know about the accident, about himself, and about supernatural vengeance.

Tommy is played by RJ Mitte, who has cerebral palsy. Tommy has the condition, as well, and it a ects his relationship with his parents and with his peers. But his main problems, and the main themes of the film, don’t include him struggling with or overcoming his condition. The Unseen is about murder, possession, betrayal, hallucinations, pools of blood—you know. Thriller stu .

The deliberately low-key and deliberately nonexploitive approach to disability can be attributed in part to Jennifer A. Goodman. Goodman is one of the cofounders of Lakefront (along with Ryan Atkins), she acts in The Unseen as Tommy’s older sister, and she wrote the script.

Goodman is autistic; as a child, she was so nonresponsive that doctors thought she was either deaf or intellectually disabled. She was finally diagnosed correctly when she was six and quickly started an extensive therapy program. “It helped me have the skill sets to work and be in the real world with other people,” she told me.

Goodman says she’s come a long way, though there are still challenges. She struggles, she says, “to get the nuances of when to break into a conversation,” and interpersonal dynamics can be a challenge unless she knows the other person well. She gets excited about things in a way that can be o -putting to neurotypical people.

There are some upsides too, though. Goodman’s excitement and energy is a boost when she’s putting together and selling creative projects. She basically invented The Unseen on the spot when networks asked her and her partner what they were working on after her pilot detective series Conrad. “A lot of them asked, ‘What do you have next on the docket?’” Goodman remembers. “And I was like, ‘Oh, we have this movie called The Unseen ! We’re doing this! We’re doing that!’ And they were like, ‘That’s great!’”

She laughs. “My partner, though, was like, ‘Uh, we’ve just talked about something briefly . . . but we never . . .’ And I was like, ‘Guess what? We’re making a feature!’”

Goodman says her interest in acting was also inspired in part by her experience trying to fit in. “Growing up, I would mimic my peers,” she told me. “I would kind of copy what they [would] say and do because I was informed that that’s how you determine what’s normal.” Sometimes people would be put o when she would copy a behavior she’d just seen. But “in the acting world, it’s been really advantageous; it really works well when I’m auditioning.”

The Unseen wasn’t originally written with a disabled protagonist in mind. Goodman, Atkins, and director Vincent Shade cast RJ Mitte because they liked his performance and wanted to work with him. Tommy makes sense as a disabled character, though, in part because Goodman brought some of her own experiences to the script. For example, there are a number of unpleasant high school flashback scenes to Tommy’s experiences of being bullied. “I’ve dealt with being bullied my entire life,” Goodman told me.

Tommy is also desperate to please his parents and make his high-powered attorney dad (William Mark McCullough) proud. Goodman identifies with that feeling, having grown up in Glencoe. “In an environment like the North Shore, there’s a certain facade that one has to live in,” she says. While her parents were a lot more supportive than Tommy’s (abusive, very unpleasant) father, she says she nonetheless often felt like she wasn’t fitting in or achieving the things she was supposed to. “I’ve experienced so much where people don’t understand me,” she says. “I’m constantly wanting to prove that I’m not a failure or prove to people that I am good enough if they’ll give me a chance.”

Goodman says that as an autistic creator, what she’d most like people to understand about autism is that “no two people are the same.” Some people with autism may be withdrawn (as Goodman was as a child); some people may talk a lot (as Goodman does now). “Autism is a spectrum,” she says. “I fall on the side that does things over-the-top.”

The Unseen isn’t a film that hits you over the head with a moral (other than maybe “avoid drawing the attention of vengeful spirits”). But by being so much less didactic than films about disability often are, it manages to make Goodman’s point that not all autistic people, or disabled people, can be put in the same box. Disabled people can be in, and tell, lots of stories—about family tragedy, spooky hauntings, career ambition, or sibling tension, to name just a few threads in Tommy’s narrative. Inspiration and overcoming are the Hollywood disability default. Goodman, Mitte, and their collaborators suggest that there’s a lot more to see. v

GODZILLA AT THE MUSIC BOX GARDEN

8: 30 PM, 7/24 -7/27

Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport

$8 general admission, $ 6 Music Box members musicboxtheatre.com/series-and-festivals/music-box-garden-movies