Standard of Care

When artist Amanda Patterson goes off her psychotropic drugs, her family frantically tries to bring her to safety. She refuses one lifeline after another, crashes a car and buys a gun. Her madness peaks, and she is committed to a long term facility. After she is released, she connects with Richard, a gallerist whose psychopathic tendencies synch up with hers. He manipulates them to his own ends, but goes too far, and she is left with only one way to break free. She shoots him, but she is the wounded one. Richard was not so much a man as the embodiment of her illness, a figure in an ongoing delusion. When Mandy’s friends discover that Richard never existed, they feel duped and enraged, and savage her character by destroying her paintings, which had always held a mirror up to the nature of her truth, the slipperiness of reality, and the urge to deceive.