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This film reveals authenticity to be something elusive, difficult, charged, contingent, and fleeting.

The safe container that Dr. Zeisel creates allows for volatility that can only occur in group therapy.

Interactions in this film feel as if they are unfolding in real time with the intensity of a documentary.

As a recovering screenwriter and current psychotherapist who has written books and taught workshops on authenticity for 15 years, I was blown away by the new film Group: The Schopenhauer Effect. Inspired by psychologist Irvin Yalom’s The Schopenhauer Cure and created in the same spirit as Mike Leigh’s Naked, Alexis Lloyd assembled a group of actors and worked with them to develop characters who interact entirely within the crucible of a group therapy setting. However, this is no conventional scripted ensemble piece: under the patronage of real-life group therapist Dr. Elliot Zeisel, the actors often did not know what the others would say, which created an element of risk that gives the film a startling aliveness.

Like the way Larry David sets up (usually awkward and uncomfortable) scenarios in........

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