Film

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Name: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Genre: Drama, History
Released: 2007
Cast: Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Seigner, Marie-Josée Croze, Anne Consigny, Patrick Chesnais

Biopic
Slow-burning

A journalist wakes from a stroke almost entirely paralysed, able to move only one eyelid, and dictates a memoir letter by letter through blinks. Julian Schnabel shoots much of it from inside Bauby's skull, blurred and lurching, so you experience the trap before you understand the man. Formally daring, emotionally exact, and far less bleak than it sounds — this is for people who want cinema to do something a book can't.

TMDb rating

3.8

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you are drawn to films that find vivid, inventive ways inside a mind trapped in a body, where small moments of humour and memory carry as much weight as the situation.

Skip it if you need fast plotting or a sense of forward momentum, since much of the film is a slow, hushed accumulation of observation and reflection that can feel repetitive.

What it asks of you: Its 112 minutes are patient and mostly unhurried, the camera lingering on faces and the mood staying quiet, melancholy rather than tearful.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

My Left Foot: The Story of Christy Brown1989

Daniel Day-Lewis, at his most ferocious, plays a man with cerebral palsy who learns to paint and write using the only limb he can control. Same defiant will, same refusal of pity.

But Day-Lewis's performance is so towering it can overshadow everyone and everything around it.

My Left Foot: The Story of Christy Brown poster

The Sea Inside2004

A Spanish quadriplegic fights for the right to die on his own terms after decades of paralysis. Javier Bardem is extraordinary, and the film sits with the same interior stillness this one does.

But It argues for euthanasia with real conviction, which some viewers will find moving and others will find one-sided.

Amour2012

Haneke's unflinching study of an elderly couple as illness dismantles one of them. Cold, precise, devastating — the closest thing to this film's clear-eyed tone rather than its warmth.

But Haneke offers no comfort whatsoever; this is one of the bleakest films ever to win the Palme d'Or.

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Ikiru1952

Both films are about a man handed a death sentence who chooses, almost as an act of rebellion, to make something meaningful with what's left — Bauby writes a book, Kurosawa's clerk builds a playground.

Kurosawa's black-and-white masterpiece about a dying bureaucrat who has months left and finally decides what his life is for. No blinking eye, no camera trickery — just a man discovering urgency.

But It's over two hours, in Japanese, from 1952, and moves at a patient, old-fashioned pace by modern standards.

The Theory of Everything2014

Eddie Redmayne's Stephen Hawking loses his body to motor neurone disease while his mind stays blazingly alive — the same central image, told with more romance and gloss.

But It smooths over the messier parts of Hawking's life for something closer to conventional biopic uplift.

Untouchable2011

French, funny, and built around an unlikely friendship between a quadriplegic aristocrat and his ex-con caretaker. If you want the same subject with warmth and jokes instead of interior dread, start here.

But Its breeziness about disability and class has drawn real criticism for being a bit too comfortable.

Breathe2017

Andrew Garfield plays a man paralysed by polio who, with his wife's help, builds a life and a movement for the disabled from inside an iron lung. True story, quietly stubborn hope.

But It's tasteful to a fault — a hard true story rendered almost entirely gentle.

The Sessions2012

John Hawkes plays a poet with polio who hires a sex surrogate, and the film treats desire and a paralysed body with unusual honesty and dry humour.

But The premise is frank about sex and disability in a way that some will find refreshing and others uncomfortable.

Still Alice2014

Julianne Moore's linguistics professor watches her own mind dissolve from early-onset Alzheimer's — another first-person account of losing control from the inside out.

But It's a fairly conventional prestige drama; nothing here matches the formal risk-taking of Bauby's story.

Wit2001

Emma Thompson, dying of ovarian cancer, addresses the camera directly and dissects her own death with the same scholarly wit she once brought to poetry. Small, stagey, quietly ferocious.

But Made for HBO, it's talky and theatrical rather than cinematic, and never lets you look away from the hospital bed.

Memento2000

Schnabel traps you inside a damaged consciousness with blur and fractured POV shots; Nolan does the same trick as a genre exercise, proving the technique works as thriller mechanics too.

A noir thriller told entirely from inside a man's broken short-term memory, scenes running backwards so you feel his disorientation rather than just watching it. A cousin in technique, not in tone.

But It's a puzzle-box thriller built for rewatching and untangling, not the quiet emotional experience this film offers.

Talk to Her2002

Both films ask what it means to communicate with — and love — someone locked inside an unresponsive body, but Almodóvar answers from outside the glass rather than inside it.

Almodóvar's strange, tender melodrama centres on a comatose woman and the man who visits her daily, talking as if she can hear every word. Warmer, weirder, and more perverse than you'd expect.

But It flirts with genuinely troubling ideas about consent and devotion that some viewers will find hard to sit with.