5 movies that acquired neurodivergence proper, and why ‘Sitaare Zameen Par’ may be part of them

Stills from movies that signify neurodiversity and neurodivergent characters

On the cusp of Sitaare Zameen Par’s launch this Friday, the freshly invigorated dialog round neurodivergence in cinema feels lengthy overdue. Marketed as a non secular sequel to Taare Zameen Par, Aamir Khan’s newest enterprise brings ten neurodivergent people into the highlight as folks with tales of their very own. That this launch follows Autistic Satisfaction Day 2025 feels fairly well timed. 

For too lengthy, neurodivergent characters in cinema have both been flattened into saintly savants or trapped in caricature. Their complexities are additionally usually sanded down for neurotypical consolation. But when autistic pleasure teaches us something, it’s that the actual problem is the lens by way of which the world insists on viewing the incapacity, somewhat than the disabilty itself. 

So, in honour of June 18, and of a movie that’s making an attempt to think about one thing extra inclusive, we revisit 5 movies which have portrayed neurodivergence with empathy, nuance, and a refusal to tidy up their themes.

A Stunning Thoughts

A nonetheless from ‘A Stunning Thoughts’
| Photograph Credit score:
Prime Video

Ron Howard’s basic biographical drama A Stunning Thoughts was an earnest try at making sense of schizophrenia—for each the individual contained in the situation and the folks orbiting him. Russell Crowe’s John Nash does succumb to sure tortured genius tropes however they hardly ever exist in a vacuum. He’s a husband, a colleague, and a person making an attempt to belief what’s actual when actuality retains shifting underneath his ft. The movie’s precise trick isn’t the twist about his hallucinations; somewhat, it’s the way wherein it presents love, routine, and cussed willpower. It’s messy and it simplifies issues, however at its core it’s a real effort to painting what it means to reside with, and never regardless of, psychological sickness.

Margarita with a Straw

A nonetheless from ‘Margerita with a Straw’
| Photograph Credit score:
Netflix

Shonali Bose’s Margarita with a Straw steers away from syrupy inspirational blurbs and offers us a bildungsroman that’s brimming with life. Kalki Koechlin performs Laila, a younger girl with cerebral palsy, who desires the identical issues everybody else does — love, intercourse, independence — and the movie lets her need them with out judgment or pity. Bose subverts each Western and desi stereotypes of incapacity by making Laila’s neurodivergence the engine that propels her and the narrative throughout continents, into relationships, and in the direction of a vivid understanding of her personal queerness.

My Identify is Khan

A nonetheless from ‘My Identify is Khan’
| Photograph Credit score:
Dharma Productions

My Identify is Khan is usually heavy-handed, but it surely comes from a spot of actual compassion. The movie centres on a person with Asperger’s syndrome in a geopolitical epic, and does so with a level of earnest dignity hardly ever afforded to neurodivergent characters in mainstream Indian cinema. Shah Rukh Khan avoids caricaturising Rizwan, and shapes him by the way in which he sees the world with deep empathy.

Discovering Dory

A nonetheless from ‘Discovering Dory’
| Photograph Credit score:
Pixar

Discovering Dory displays a long-standing Pixar custom of addressing social points underneath the guise of youngsters’s leisure. The movie treats the talkative, titular Blue Tang fish with short-term reminiscence loss with sincerity. She forgets issues, however she additionally adapts, repeats, invents workarounds and “retains swimming”. The movie isn’t about curing her or altering her, however concerning the fish round her studying to know and assist her.

Every part In all places All at As soon as

A nonetheless from ‘Every part In all places All at As soon as’
| Photograph Credit score:
A24

Every part In all places All at As soon as feels precisely like what it’s prefer to reside in a mind that doesn’t all the time play by the principles. In truth, one of many directing duo, Daniel Kwan, got here to grasp his personal undiagnosed ADHD through the writing course of. Evelyn and Pleasure are by no means explicitly labelled, however the movie’s tackle identification, notion, and that means feels deeply acquainted to anybody who’s ever felt like their thoughts is a bit too loud. The multiverse here’s a metaphor for each “what if” and “ought to have been” that clutters the common ADHD mind. The movie leaves us with the tender thought that perhaps readability isn’t about fixing the noise, however studying how you can sit with it.