Forgettable medical melodrama

BRAIN on Fire is a biographical drama about American journalist Susannah Cahalan's harrowing struggle with a mysterious illness eight years ago when she was 24, fresh out of university with a "dream job" as a rising reporter at the New York Post.

Cahalan, played here by Chloë Grace Moretz, began hearing voices and hallucinating. She grew paranoid. She had memory lapses and violent mood swings.

Perplexed doctors could find nothing wrong with her. They attribute her condition to job stress and too much partying as her health inexplicably, rapidly, worsens over the following weeks: watching her thrash about during an episode of seizure and then lapse into glassy-eyed droopy-lipped catatonia, we wonder if it isn't an exorcist she needs instead for a classic case of horror cinema demonic possession.