Hudson Milbank is a successful Hollywood screenwriter who smokes a joint one night and never comes back. He can see and hear everything, but it feels like it is happening to someone else, on the other side of glass. The condition is called depersonalization disorder, and Numb is the only mainstream film ever made about it, written by a man who had it.
What Happens To Hudson
He goes through a string of therapists: one who falls asleep, one played by Mary Steenburgen who starts sleeping with him, one who prescribes everything. His writing partner, played by Kevin Pollak, keeps the career going while Hudson sits on the couch. Then he meets Sara, played by Lynn Collins, who likes him before she knows anything is wrong, and the film becomes about whether you can love someone through a wall you cannot feel. His mother is a nightmare. The tone swings between sitcom and something much darker, often in the same scene.
Why Matthew Perry Took It
Perry made this between the end of Friends and Studio 60, and it is the performance of his that comes closest to what he later wrote about his own life. Harris Goldberg, who directed, had the disorder himself and said Hudson was him. The film went to DVD in 2008 without much notice and has found its audience slowly.
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