Misdiagnosed: Reclaiming “Barefoot” from Critical Neglect
I know this is a strange choice to launch a blog about art and culture, a forgotten romantic dramedy from 2014 that critics barely touched and the mental health community seemed to swat away on reflex, like a gnat that got too close to a diagnosis. Barefoot is not a canonical work. It’s not visionary or cult-classic. It's a quiet movie by traditional standards. But it’s where I’m starting. Barefoot, odd, unassuming, and almost accidentally revealing, is part of what drove me to create this space in the first place.
This blog wasn’t born out of a need to celebrate prestige. It was born out of frustration at how often cultural works, especially small, fragile, tonally strange ones, get misread, flattened, or dismissed by people who seem not to have experienced them at all. The kind of “critical drive-by” that reduces a film to a logline, a thumbnail, or worse, a hashtag for outrage. I wrote about this in my post Beyond the Blurb, where I questioned what’s lost when we confuse recognition with understanding, and speed with seriousness.
Barefoot is a prime example.
Here is a film that engages with themes of trauma, guilt, and survival. It centers on a protagonist, Daisy Kensington (played by Evan Rachel Wood), whose behavior is shaped not by chemical imbalance or clinical psychosis, but by something far murkier: inherited delusion, psychological captivity, and moral paralysis. And yet, when it was finally released, the loudest voices in the room branded it offensive to the mentally ill. Infantilizing. Dangerous. A rom-com for schizophrenics.
As someone who has battled with mental health for years, both privately and within systems that often confuse pain for pathology, that kind of surface-level scorn didn’t just miss the point; it revealed how lazy and unempathetic our critical frameworks can be, even when they’re flying the flag of awareness.
So yes, this is where I’ll begin.
Not with a masterpiece. Not with something fashionable. But with a film that was trying, clumsily, sincerely, and imperfectly, to say something about the emotional wreckage we mistake for diagnosis. A film that asks what happens when a survivor is misread by everyone around her, including the audience.
Let’s talk about Barefoot.
Barefoot was released in 2014, written by Stephen Zotnowski and directed by Andrew Fleming, best known for his offbeat, comedic films like Dick, The Craft, and Hamlet 2. This film, a remake of the 2005 German movie Barfuss, is perhaps his most tonally ambiguous work, neither a pure romance, nor a straightforward drama, nor a satire.
It stars Evan Rachel Wood as Daisy Kensington and Scott Speedman as Jay Wheeler. Wood brings her signature quiet intensity to Daisy, while Speedman leans into a familiar role, a handsome screw-up with something to prove. Marketed as a quirky romantic comedy in which a wayward rich kid brings a sheltered psych patient to a wedding, the film was quietly released to VOD and went almost unnoticed. Critics gave it a collective shrug or a sneer. Rotten Tomatoes holds it at 14%. Most reviews dismissed it as cloying, tone-deaf, and exploitative.
But those summaries, and the marketing itself, don’t reflect what’s actually on screen.
When "Barefoot " premiered, it collided with an already tense cultural moment surrounding the portrayal of mental illness in media. Viewers and critics alike had grown weary, justifiably, of films that used mental health as window dressing for whimsical narratives. From Silver Linings Playbook to The Perks of Being a Wallflower, the trope of the "quirky broken girl" has become both cliché and controversial.
And into this climate wandered Barefoot, wearing soft lighting and sentimental cues like a target. Critics were ready. The New York Times called it infantilizing. Others labeled it dangerous. Some even went so far as to call it a “rom-com for schizophrenics.”
But the question is: Did they actually watch it?
There is no scene in which Daisy displays symptoms of psychosis. No hallucinations. No delusions. No disorganized speech. She is not presented as mentally ill. What we get instead is something far more disquieting: a young woman shaped by years of emotional imprisonment, raised by a paranoid schizophrenic mother who told her that driving causes pregnancy and that cleaning earns love. Daisy didn’t kill her mother; she simply didn’t respond to her screams in the night. That guilt is her diagnosis, if you want one.
She is then institutionalized—not because she poses a threat, but because no one knows what else to do with her. And in a telling reflection of real-world institutional practices, the doctors don’t attempt to understand her history or condition before prescribing medication. Evan Rachel Wood noted this herself, saying:
"People at places like that are misdiagnosed all the time, but that’s a whole other discussion!"
It’s not a whole other discussion. It’s this one. Daisy is medicated before she’s truly diagnosed. She is misread by the very professionals meant to care for her, a thematic mirror to the audience’s own rush to judgment.
Fleming doesn’t overplay his hand. The film has a quiet, naturalistic visual palette, often bathed in soft sunlight or shadowed interiors. It avoids clinical spaces and symptom montages, favoring instead long takes of characters simply sitting, walking, talking, or more often, failing to talk.
The narrative structure is familiar: a road trip, a wedding, a misfit pair slowly opening to each other. But within that genre scaffolding are choices that resist straightforward interpretation. Daisy’s speech patterns shift. Her eye contact varies. She listens more than she speaks. These aren’t manic pixie behaviors, they’re trauma responses. And Wood plays them without affectation.
Watch the way she mimics language, slightly off. The way she flinches when touched. The way she watches Jay’s mother, not with confusion, but with longing. These are not signs of illness. They’re signs of a life spent observing rather than participating. The visual style frames her not as an object of curiosity, but as someone out of sync with her surroundings because those surroundings are so new.
Even Jay isn’t her savior. He’s just someone broken in a louder way. Their connection isn’t healing; it’s tentative, transactional, and necessary. Their “romance” is less a resolution than a brief reprieve.
Barefoot barely made a cultural dent. Its box office numbers were negligible. Its critical reception was, at best, disinterested. But in failing to spark serious conversation, it revealed something larger: how even well-meaning critical frameworks can default to stereotypes when presented with emotional ambiguity.
The film was shelved in the wrong genre, marketed with the wrong tone, and reviewed through the wrong lens. A story about trauma, guilt, and emotional reentry was mistaken for a mentally ill Cinderella story. And when Daisy didn’t fit the expected mold, critics declared the film broken.
Yet its very refusal to label her, to pathologize her, cure her, or even decode her, might be the most radical thing about it.
To me, Daisy isn’t mentally ill. She’s unparented. Unformed. Guilt-ridden in the most quietly unbearable way.
She doesn’t fit the tropes: not the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, not the Damaged Seductress, not the Healing Innocent. She’s awkward. She’s affectless. She’s sometimes even frustrating. But she is never false.
She doesn’t want to fix Jay. She doesn’t even know how to want.
What she wants, what she needs, is permission to exist. To step into the world without apology. And that’s what Barefoot gives her, not through a love story, but through a series of soft, unremarkable moments: riding in a car, holding a dress, watching people dance.
The central trauma, her inaction during her mother’s death, isn’t dramatized. It’s confessed. And that choice matters. It reframes the film not as a narrative of mental illness, but as a meditation on moral guilt.
This is why Barefoot was misread: because it didn’t declare itself. It asked viewers to sit with uncertainty, to discern intent through tone rather than dialogue. And in our culture of hyper-labeled content, that ambiguity was seen not as honesty, but as error.
There’s a moment in Barefoot that isn’t shot for drama, but it haunts the entire film. Daisy, lying in bed, hears her mother screaming in the night. And she doesn’t get up.
That’s it. No confrontation. No slow-motion rush to the door. Just a girl in the dark, frozen, letting the moment pass, and paying for it with the rest of her life.
Critics saw this story and asked: What’s wrong with her?
The better question is: What happened to her?
That’s the lens this film needed—and the one it never received. Because we still live in a culture that pathologizes discomfort. That confuses awkwardness for incompetence. That demands trauma be loud and linear, or else we refuse to recognize it.
Barefoot is about someone whose pain doesn’t perform. And that, I think, is why it matters now. In an era where everyone is expected to narrate their damage for the benefit of the crowd, Daisy remains uncertain. She is not a metaphor. She is not a cautionary tale. She is simply someone who lived through something unspeakable—and survived in a way that isn’t cinematic, but all too real.
If most viewers missed that, I don’t blame them. It’s easy to look away from what doesn’t declare itself. But if you're still reading, perhaps you're not the typical viewer.
Perhaps you’ve also experienced being misread.
If so, Barefoot is worth your time.
And this blog is for you.
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