A Beautiful Mind (2001) Ron Howard

John Nash attends Princeton University on a scholarship for maths, it doesn't take him long to realise he is better with numbers then with people. When pressured to develop an idea for his thesis he begins to struggle and it isn't until he gets cruelly rejected by a girl that he gets inspired and comes up with an idea for mathematical economics.

Nash meets his future wife whilst teaching five years after finishing at Princeton. He runs into a mysterious department of defence agent during a visit to Princeton and is invited to a secret US department of defence facility in the Pentagon to crack encryption enemy codes. He becomes increasingly paranoid and behaves erratically after believing that Russians are after him.

Alicia, his wife who is so desperate to help him, informs a psychiatric hospital and he gets sent to a facility where he confirms his belief that the Soviets were trying to extract information. After more psychiatric treatment it's revealed that a good friend of his named Charles that he shared a room with at Princton, as well as the Russians and the agents, were all a delusion.

Nash's behaviour and relationship with Alicia changes negatively after taking medicine to help his condition but he stops after his intellectual capacity drops. After realising that Charles' niece, who is also made up, never gets old. He accepts that these people are part of his hallucinations.

Many years later, Nash has learned to ignore his hallucinations and earns the privilege to teach again where is goes on to win the Nobel Memorial Price in Economics for his revolutionary work on game theory. As Alicia and Nash leave the building, Charles, his niece and the mysterious department of defence agent are all standing there.

I was surprised to find out that Nash's friend Charles was his imaginary friend. It made sense afterwards once it was revealed but i was quite upset. Throughout the whole film i was spurring Nash on hoping he would recover from his hallucinations. I was expecting him to be okay, there was a few different moment that I was expecting him to get over his illness but he didn't ever fully recover and he went on to win a nobel prize.

What i will take from this film is the real friendship he had with Charles. Even though Charles wasn't real, I want my character to have a close friend that he can rely on and be there for. So if he is real or not to the audience, he will be real for my character and real for the story.