2:37

On Tuesday night at 2:37 I lost consciousness. At 2:37 the movie, that is, not the time.

The movie is gut-wrenching and reaches its gruelling (almost ten minutes) and chilling crescendo as a teenage girl slits her wrists with a pair of scissors. It was during this scene that I blacked out, then woke up gasping for air, with fists clenched, legs I could scarcely feel, a temperature that was soaring, and surrounded by a worried-looking wife and strangers telling me to breath. A very scary experience.

I’m not sure why I blacked out.

The movie’s treatment of its subject was one likely contributor. 2:37 looks at the wickedly cruel, unforgiving and lonely worlds of six teenagers – worlds from which stable parents, sympathetic friends or role model teachers are absent. By the suicide scene, the tension is, well was, too much to handle.

Are these worlds unrealistic? Too fraught? Perhaps. But one thing that’s depicted well is the fragility and smallness of the inner worlds – the emotional and psychological lives – of teenagers.

Another likely contributor to my ‘out’ was a jam-packed theatre, which was hot and probably lacking oxygen.*

To revive, I laid on my back on the floor beneath our seats; my wife padded my face with wet Chux cloths. I remember looking down my body and seeing my boots sticking out into the aisle. As I looked at them, another pair of feet strode past toward the front of the cinema. These were the feet of Murali K. Thalluri, the film’s twenty-two-year-old director, who was about to commence a Q&A session with the audience.

Under the moonlight

About half-an-hour later I found myself lying on my back again in the cinema’s outdoor courtyard, hoping that the fresh air would help me recover. This time Thalluri was sitting beside me. After the audience had left, at my prodding, my wife had approached Thalluri and asked if he would come outside and say ‘hello’. He was more than willing, claiming that he had seen my boots as he was walking to the stage, and had felt terrible about me laying there.

He sat on the cold pavers beside my wife and me for about 15 minutes, and we talked about books, depression, the responses of parents when their kids are depressed, Adelaide (where he lives), India (where he’s from), writing screenplays, and the movie, 2:37.

I suggested he read Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brother’s Karamazov, and he raved about the book in his hand, The Time Traveller’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger, upon which another film may be based. Thalluri seemed sincere and friendly, and though I was, and remain, shaken by the movie and my response to it, swapping stories with the director under the moonlight salvaged at least some of the night.

*My doctor’s officiously-delivered verdict this morning was that I had hyperventilated, causing my blood pressure to drop and an undersupply of CO_2.