‘This Isn't Wonderland’ explores the meaning and politics of “women and madness” from a feminist perspective, threading together elements of narrative, theatre and documentary. Part of the film tells the story of a housewife, Alice, who finds herself so alienated that a suicide attempt results followed by a suffocating stay in a clinic. Cut in and out of these dramatic scenes are discussions with a number of women who have suffered similar experiences and the comments of a sympathetic psychiatrist. This world of severe depression (in which most of those affected are women, mostly married) is symbolised in a chessboard nightmare sequence, a play within the film which shows survivors as women who repress their own needs and desires. Then, in a reversal of traditional film styles, (“realism” usually conveys hardship while “fantasy” is associated with happiness), the film suggests reason for optimism in its final documentary-like footage. 

... despite the painful revelations presented to us, we feel that the situation is far from irremediable. On the contrary, we feel that women are developing more and more resources and tools that are enabling them to thwart the rules of the game and checkmate the suffocating societal structures that threaten us all with madness… 

– Helen Doyle and Nicole Giguère

The three women's recollections of feelings of inadequacy, retreats into fantasy, and the experienced struggle of a divided self exploding into confused rage, are translated into images and symbols that litter the fictionalised world inhabited by the character Alice, who mirrors and embodies the fragmented self/selves... Alice is urged to "choose" her stereotype: obsessive housewife, catatonic mother, sexual object. Refusal threatens banishment, to be frozen "mad" out of life. Documentary and fiction are rapidly interchanged. Alice smashes the mirror, looks to other women and begins to experience growth in a fertile climate of mutual, creative support that values and transforms her chaos. This is everywoman's journey: take it, see the film.

– Maggie Carr, Spare Rib 

Description source: Circles Catalogue (circa 1983). Compiled by Helen MacKintosh and Margaret Gillan. Edited by Felicity Sparrow.