The Stimming Pool: a truly radical cinematic exploration of neurodiversity

While it’s tempting to begin by couching The Stimming Pool in the context of cinema’s contentious relationship with autism, to do so would be to miss the intentions of a documentary that exists on its own terms. Conceived by The Neurocultures Collective with the filmmaker Steven Eastwood, this is not a reaction or a riposte to what has come before so much as a reimagining of the form through a different gaze.

That gaze belongs to five autistic artists – Georgia Kumari Bradburn, Sam Chown Ahern, Lucy Walker, Robin Elliott-Knowles and Benjamin Brown – as well as Steven Eastwood, whose previous, hospice-set documentary feature Island (2017) challenged received wisdom about showing death on screen. The Stimming Pool, an elusive and mesmerising docufiction film – funded by the Wellcome Trust – is not designed to interrogate or demystify autism, but to probe the boundaries of what cinema can be.

The result is as vast and strange as the lives it explores. The focus of each scene is rarely signposted, creating an atmosphere in which what you should be taking in and how you should be reacting is a moot point. If this is occasionally disorienting then it accurately conveys, on an experiential level, how it feels to be a neurodiverse person moving through a world governed by norms that make no sense to your brain. But moments of overwhelm and confusion are balanced by moments of relief, freedom, creativity and joy

Each member of the collective devised their own contribution to this sleek yet expansive hour-long film. ElliottKnowles is shown preparing to introduce a lost, schlocky, zombie B movie to an audience at a cinema in Hastings. Chown Ahern sets her contribution in the medical environment of an eye-tracking test. The rules of realism dissipate as we go from watching her watching a busy street scene on a desktop computer monitor to embedding in the scene itself. 

The Stimming Pool makes the case – implicitly through its emotional affect – that the heightened sensitivities experienced by autistic people and the heightened sensitivities of cinema are twins. Something like navigating a busy public thoroughfare is an experience that neurotypical people tend to habituate, whereas The Stimming Pool compels us to identify with it as an everyday challenge to the senses. While Chown-Ahern is in the doctor’s waiting room filling in a stressful questionnaire, she makes contact with a small child reading a book about ‘Chess the magical border collie’. Chess, the invention of fellow collaborator Lucy Walker, is designed to help all people with disabilities. In this picture book and as a real, live-action dog (who shows scant regard for what he represents), he pops up across the film to offer solace.

Distress. Relief. Distress. There’s a sense of wonder as the film weaves together long takes in naturalistic settings, presenting magical interludes in the great outdoors and then the private indoor spaces where collaborators are free to unmask – giving in to the emotions of the day. Chess appears intermittently as a leitmotif. “It’s enjoyable even if you don’t know the meaning,” Lucy explains about her canine creation – which is also true about surrendering to experiential cinema and its challenging, hypnotic rhythm.

Georgia Bradburn devised a manifesto for an ‘autistic camera’, commandeering the tools of production to create a new cinematic language. The camera, wielded by cinematographer Gregory Oke (Aftersun, 2022), is sometimes masked then unmasked, stimming or dancing in response to events on screen.

‘Stimming’ and ‘masking’ represent two poles of the autistic experience. The former refers to a free expression of repetitive movements that individuals use to self-soothe when overwhelmed; the latter is the suppression of these movements, and other neurodivergent traits, in order to avoid spooking the neurotypicals, regardless of the pain the masker must internalise. When people want to dance, they can go to a nightclub; there should be a place where autistic people go to unmask. Within the film, this is a literal place, an empty swimming pool where the collaborators move and dance, free to just be as they are. The Stimming Pool is a call to create an unmasked canon as well as a real utopia. The film elides conventional descriptions. It is something truly collective – radical in ways that challenge not just neurodiverse stereotypes, but the film’s industry standard ways of telling a story.

► The Stimming Pool is in UK cinemas from 28 March.