Five films that got neurodivergence right, and why ‘Sitaare Zameen Par' might join them

The Hindu

18-06-2025

On the cusp of Sitaare Zameen Par's release this Friday, the freshly invigorated conversation around neurodivergence in cinema feels long overdue. Marketed as a spiritual sequel to Taare Zameen Par, Aamir Khan's latest venture brings ten neurodivergent individuals into the spotlight as people with stories of their own. That this release follows Autistic Pride Day 2025 feels quite timely.
For too long, neurodivergent characters in cinema have either been flattened into saintly savants or trapped in caricature. Their complexities are also often sanded down for neurotypical comfort. But if autistic pride teaches us anything, it's that the real challenge is the lens through which the world insists on viewing the disability, rather than the disabilty itself.
So, in honour of June 18, and of a film that is trying to imagine something more inclusive, we revisit five films that have portrayed neurodivergence with empathy, nuance, and a refusal to tidy up their themes.
A Beautiful Mind
Ron Howard's classic biographical drama A Beautiful Mind was an earnest attempt at making sense of schizophrenia—for both the person inside the condition and the people orbiting him. Russell Crowe's John Nash does succumb to certain tortured genius tropes but they rarely exist in a vacuum. He's a husband, a colleague, and a man trying to trust what's real when reality keeps shifting under his feet. The film's actual trick isn't the twist about his hallucinations; rather, it's the manner in which it presents love, routine, and stubborn willpower. It's messy and it simplifies things, but at its core it's a genuine effort to portray what it means to live with, and not despite, mental illness.
Margarita with a Straw
Shonali Bose's Margarita with a Straw steers clear of syrupy inspirational blurbs and gives us a bildungsroman that's brimming with life. Kalki Koechlin plays Laila, a young woman with cerebral palsy, who wants the same things everyone else does — love, sex, independence — and the film lets her want them without judgment or pity. Bose subverts both Western and desi stereotypes of disability by making Laila's neurodivergence the engine that propels her and the narrative across continents, into relationships, and towards a vivid understanding of her own queerness.
My Name is Khan
My Name is Khan is often heavy-handed, but it comes from a place of real compassion. The film centres on a man with Asperger's syndrome in a geopolitical epic, and does so with a degree of earnest dignity rarely afforded to neurodivergent characters in mainstream Indian cinema. Shah Rukh Khan avoids caricaturising Rizwan, and shapes him by the way he sees the world with deep empathy.
Finding Dory
Finding Dory reflects a long-standing Pixar tradition of addressing social issues under the guise of children's entertainment. The film treats the talkative, titular Blue Tang fish with short-term memory loss with sincerity. She forgets things, but she also adapts, repeats, invents workarounds and 'keeps swimming'. The film isn't about curing her or changing her, but about the fish around her learning to understand and support her.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
Everything Everywhere All at Once feels exactly like what it's like to live in a brain that doesn't always play by the rules. In fact, one of the directing duo, Daniel Kwan, came to realise his own undiagnosed ADHD during the writing process. Evelyn and Joy are never explicitly labelled, but the film's take on identity, perception, and meaning feels deeply familiar to anyone who's ever felt like their mind is a bit too loud. The multiverse here is a metaphor for every 'what if' and 'should have been' that clutters the average ADHD brain. The film leaves us with the tender thought that maybe clarity isn't about fixing the noise, but learning how to sit with it.