REFERRAL SUMMARY & PRESENTING NEED
PART 006: SUMMARY OF THE INCIDENT
LOGLINE
A lonely woman attends a voluntary wellbeing assessment, where increasingly absurd tests promise to determine what should happen to her — until she is offered the thing she thought she wanted: permission to disappear.
PART 007: DETAILS OF THE INCIDENT
SYNOPSIS
Marianne Strang arrives at a concrete municipal facility for a voluntary wellbeing review she does not remember arranging. A receptionist asks her to draw a bird called Loneliness and rate the likelihood that she will harm herself. When Marianne hesitates, he records her response as 8/10 — very likely.
She is moved through ARRIVAL, APPRAISAL and DEPARTURE. Each room offers a new sequence of therapeutic questions, impossible tasks and reassuring announcements. Marianne continues trying to cooperate because some part of her still believes that if she performs correctly, the process may help.
At the end of the assessment, a door opens back onto her ordinary life. Her phone fills with missed calls, calendar alerts and a bank warning. Behind a curtain, the institution has prepared another option: a mattress surrounded by flowers, fruit, cake and everything she made during the test.
Marianne is offered the relief of disappearing. Instead of choosing between the institution’s two outcomes, she makes one small decision for herself: she sits among the flowers, picks up the slice of cake and eats.