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What do you do if your autistic son is unresponsive to treatment yet inexplicably soothed by the proximity of horses? If you are Rupert Isaacson and his wife, Kristin Neff, you take him to a country where horses are as essential as water: Mongolia.
“The Horse Boy” is a record of that extraordinary journey, a grueling weekslong trek across the plains of Mongolia in search of shamanic help for Rowan, their 5-year-old son. Plagued by inconsolable tantrums, chronic incontinence and severe dissociation, the boy is no one’s idea of a congenial travel companion; but as his parents endure discomfort, defeat and ritual floggings (“You’re not allowed to scream,” Mr. Isaacson warns his deep-breathing spouse), the director and photographer, Michel Orion Scott, finds a windswept beauty in surroundings so barren that the shores of Lake Sharga appear like a mirage.
Resolutely unvarnished (“I didn’t expect an urban slum,” Mr. Isaacson remarks on arriving in the capital city, Ulan Bator) and astonishingly intimate, “The Horse Boy” chronicles a couple in emotional and physical extremity. Though experts are on hand — including Dr. Simon Baron-Cohen, a Cambridge University psychologist and eerily look-alike cousin of the comedian Sacha — to tell us how little they know about autism, the film is not a primer on this heartbreaking condition. Instead it recounts a deeply personal, highly subjective and inarguably thought-provoking story of one family’s quest for a certain kind of peace.
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
The review in The NY Times:
