Film Review: Living with a Visionary

James Cromwell Gives Voice to a Love Story That Finds Beauty at the Edge of Memory

Stephen P. Neary’s exquisite hand-drawn short transforms one husband’s experience of caring for his wife through Parkinson’s, hallucination and loss into a deeply humane meditation on what it means to love someone whose reality is slowly drifting beyond your reach.

There is an extraordinary tenderness at the center of Living With a Visionary, Stephen P. Neary’s 15-minute animated short about a marriage being altered — but never entirely diminished — by illness. Adapted from poet and longtime Notre Dame professor John Matthias’ memoir about his wife, Diana, the film could easily have approached its subject as a conventional story of decline. Instead, Neary does something more difficult. He allows grief and wonder to occupy the same frame.

Narrated by James Cromwell, with Katherine LaVictoire also among the voice cast, the film follows John after roughly 50 years of marriage as Diana, an art curator living with Parkinson’s disease, begins experiencing increasingly vivid hallucinations. Rather than merely observing those visions from outside, John gradually learns to coexist with them, entering — as much as anyone can — the strange new world in which the woman he loves now lives.

That distinction is everything.

Living With a Visionary is not really about whether Diana sees things that are there. It is about whether John can continue to see Diana.

Neary’s film finds its emotional power in that question without underlining it. There is no villain here except time, illness and the brutal logistical realities of caregiving. Diana’s visions can be disorienting and frightening, but they can also be magnificent. Her background as an art curator seems to furnish her mind with an enormous visual vocabulary: the world reorganizes itself around paintings, people, creatures and impossible happenings. Matthias’ original account describes visions ranging from giants and marching bands to figures inhabiting the couple’s home, while also recording moments in which Diana seems genuinely awestruck by what she sees.

For another filmmaker, hallucinations like these might have invited flashy visual effects. Neary instead makes the crucial decision to render them through animation — and, more specifically, through an intensely physical form of hand-drawn animation.

The result is breathtaking precisely because it never looks overly polished.

Neary storyboarded the film digitally and created rough animation in Adobe Animate, but its finished imagery was constructed from drawings on layers of vellum and paper, colored with watercolor crayons and pencils. Backgrounds were made using old animation bond supplied by Neary’s NYU mentor John Canemaker; individual layers were then scanned at high resolution and composited digitally. Neary has described each shot as something like a paper puzzle, with translucent layers overlapping and interacting to create depth.

That technique becomes more than an aesthetic choice. It feels thematically inseparable from the story.

Images bleed into one another. Lines remain fragile. Colors feel capable of fading or changing underneath your eyes. People and environments appear tangible and impermanent at once. The handmade quality gives Diana’s hallucinations something computer-generated imagery might have struggled to provide: vulnerability.

The world does not simply transform. It trembles.

And because the animation is so tactile, we become unusually receptive to Diana’s perception of things. Neary does not ask the audience to diagnose what we are seeing. He asks us, briefly, to inhabit it.

That is also John’s challenge.

Caregiving stories often focus on sacrifice, and Living With a Visionary certainly does not romanticize what caring for a seriously ill spouse demands. But the film is more interested in accommodation as an expression of love: the strange emotional negotiation required when arguing with someone's perception no longer helps them. Matthias eventually learns that denying Diana’s visions serves little purpose, so he begins acknowledging the people and events she sees.

There is something devastating about that adjustment because it contains both surrender and extraordinary devotion.

James Cromwell is perfectly suited to articulate it.

At this point in his career, Cromwell needs very little vocal decoration to communicate an entire lifetime. His performance as narrator is restrained, weathered and refreshingly resistant to sentimentality. The material does not need an actor insisting upon its sadness; the sadness is already there. Cromwell instead brings the steadiness of someone trying to understand events while surviving them.

His voice carries age without reducing John to frailty, and love without turning him into a saint.

That matters because John’s experience eventually becomes unbearable.

As the COVID-19 pandemic descends, the fragile system holding the couple together begins collapsing. Diana’s condition deteriorates, outside help becomes more difficult to obtain, and John finds himself physically and psychologically overwhelmed. Eventually the two are separated: Diana enters institutional care, while John himself struggles through a psychiatric hospitalization. Their separation transforms what had been a shared battle into parallel isolation.

Here Living With a Visionary expands beyond a story about Parkinson’s.

It becomes a story about the peculiar cruelty of losing someone before losing them.

John can still speak to Diana. She is still alive. There are recognizable fragments of the woman with whom he spent five decades. Yet he increasingly occupies one reality while she occupies another. The tragedy is not merely that he cannot bring her back into his world; it is that he has spent years trying to enter hers and still cannot follow her all the way.

Neary avoids making Diana’s hallucinations synonymous with horror. That restraint is one of the film’s greatest virtues. Some visions frighten her, but others delight her. She looks at things John cannot see and wants him to share in their beauty. Neary has said this aspect of Matthias’ memoir particularly affected him — the idea that Diana’s visual imagination could remain capable of wonder even as illness was dismantling other parts of her life.

The animation allows that wonder to exist without pretending that the disease itself is beautiful.

That is an important difference.

Simon Panrucker’s music similarly occupies the border between tenderness and unease, accompanying images that can feel dreamlike without allowing the film to float away from its painful reality. Panrucker has described the score as tender, haunting and gently psychedelic, an apt description for a film constantly negotiating between what is physically present and what exists only within perception.

Yet Living With a Visionary reserves its most powerful gesture for something much simpler than hallucination.

Poetry.

During John’s final phone conversation with Diana after she contracts COVID, he reads her the first poem he ever wrote for her. The moment brings the film quietly full circle. Before illness, before caregiving, before institutions and medications and hallucinations, there were two people choosing one another.

A poem once written at the beginning of love becomes something offered near its end.

Neary understands enough not to crowd that realization.

The short’s compact running time also works in its favor. At 15 minutes, Living With a Visionary has little room for exposition, and there are moments when one might wish to know more about Diana before illness — to encounter more of the woman who fascinated John long before she became someone requiring his care. But the absence also creates a peculiar ache. Like John, we receive Diana in fragments: memories, images, observations and visions.

Perhaps fragments are the point.

The film itself took years to complete. Neary worked on it intermittently, sometimes largely alone, before receiving a Kayla Thomas Filmmaker Grant from Rooftop Films in 2023; producer Mireia Vilanova and Cartuna later helped bring the production to completion. Neary ultimately worked with a small group of additional animators as the Sundance deadline approached.

That labor is visible on screen, not as technical showmanship but as care.

In an era in which animation increasingly invites conversations about automation and artificial intelligence, there is something especially resonant about watching a film concerned with memory and human imperfection expressed through thousands of physical marks made by human hands. Neary himself has described the short as deliberately human and handcrafted — an artistic philosophy that feels particularly appropriate for a story whose central question is how we preserve a person when so much of what once defined their world begins slipping away.

The film won the Short Film Jury Award: Animation at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, where it had its world premiere, a recognition that makes sense not simply because of its visual craftsmanship but because Neary has found a form uniquely suited to his subject.

Live action could have shown us Diana hallucinating.

Animation allows us to hallucinate with her. And Cromwell's performance ensures that, even as the images drift into fantasy, John remains emotionally anchored to the earth.

The title ultimately reveals the film’s most beautiful idea. Diana is not described simply as a patient, an invalid or a woman experiencing hallucinations. She is a visionary.

It is a word that restores something illness so often takes away: identity.

Stephen P. Neary has made a film about Parkinson’s and caregiving, certainly, but Living With a Visionary is ultimately something larger and sadder. It is about the impossible intimacy of marriage — spending a lifetime believing you know another person, only to discover that there remain places inside them you cannot enter.

John cannot see Diana’s giants.

He cannot see her imaginary visitors.

He cannot completely inhabit the extraordinary landscape unfolding before her eyes.

But he can listen when she tells him about it.

And perhaps that is the film’s most moving definition of enduring love: You don't have to see the same world as the person beside you. Sometimes loving them means believing that their world matters because they are the one seeing it.