The Professor and the Madman (2019)

In this drama inspired by real events, the inmate of an insane asylum becomes one of the main contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary, then being carried out under the supervision of an outsider to the academic world.

Painfully bad writing makes this a real chore to sit through. The real life story of the titular 'madman' was a really shocking series of events, which, if filmed with a minimum degree of faithfulness, would probably be anything but boring. The film has destroyed that possibility through a paradoxical combination of an excess of decorum (which all but eliminated the sexual component from the surgeon's early life and later delusions) and a lack of it (by imagining a preposterous romantic angle in the relationship between him and his victim's widow). As for the side of the 'professor' (who by the way never was one), its plot development relies on infantile conspiratorial clichés about envious or greedy academics who try to destroy the linguist's work.

Rating: 25