The Electricity of Love: Review of The Electrical Life of Louis Wain (2021)

Synopsis

The Electrical Life of Louis Wain (2021) follows the life, the relationship, and the creative rise, fall, and ‘re-rise’ of the animator Louis Wain. On the surface, the movie seems like an endless cycle of unfortunate events, dotted with way too many cats and cat pictures. However, this movie explores the subtleties of creativity, love, grief, and mental health issues.

Analysis

While I believe the 20th century to be the golden age of cinematography, every so often a modern movie surprises me. The Electrical Life of Louis Wain (2021) is one such movie. I cried at many points in this movie. Humanity has a way of redeeming itself at every turn and Louis Wain is the poster child for this redemption. Though he was not a (financial) success, Louis succeeded in a way most conventionally successful people never do. He left a legacy that outlived his failures and his life. The principal theme of this movie is how all of life is electricity. It is what births ideas in our brains and what crackles in your blood when you fall in love. It is what short circuits our brains and liquefies our pain when we grieve.

The Electricity of Creativity

What turns an idea into the words that finally become a book?

Or a mental image into the strokes that finally become a painting

What turns an idea into a plan that finally becomes a startup?

Electricity.

It is urgent and insistent, creative and transformative. It is what makes a lamp filament give light and what transforms the potentiality of an idea into the reality of an invention. And Louis had it in spades. Even when his ideas were rebuffed or inventions failed to sputter to life, he kept channeling that electricity. It was this electricity, crackling with the energy of rebirth, that helped him look beyond the perceived…