Day Release

Synopsis

When the stress of running a large business in an increasingly competitive world became too much to bear, Jeff Baker's wife and associates conspire to have him sectioned under the Mental Health Act 1983. Now, six months later, he is entitled to an informal Mental Health Review Tribunal to determine his fitness to return to society.





Initially, the panel recommend a conditional discharge that amounts to little more than granting him 'Day Release', under the foolish assumption that nothing could go wrong in one day.





But the intervening months have wreaked havoc on both his private and business life, and in his attempt to rebuild them, he is told that his parents are dead, his kids have flown the nest to join obscure cults, his wife has run off with his business partner whose embezzling tendencies have resulted in the total collapse of their company which is now being controlled by their former accountant, under his deceptive guise as The Official Receiver.





As Jeff accumulates the evidence that is to prove that both he and his wife have been misled, manipulated, cheated and lied to, he acquires a string of witnesses who all, without exception, suffer from one form of phobia or another. In effect, he comes to realise what the medical profession has known all along, that everyone in the world is neurotic, it's just that some of these neuroses, such as an obsession with money, have become generally approved of by society.

Details

Year

1998

Type of film

Features

Running Time

92 mins

Format

Digi Beta

Director

Charlie Gauvain

Producer

Martin Darvill, Sir Nicholas Bonsor

Director of Photography

Andy Murray

Principal Cast

Simon Green, Manouk van der Meulen, Elaine Hallam, Sarah Withe, Fiona Christie and Garth Bardsley

Executive Screen Writer

Tim Purcell

Genre

Production status

Complete

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Last updated 26th November 2005