A depressed teenager checks himself into a mental ward, sees how crazy everybody else is - "My bed's on fire!" - and feels suddenly cured. But he finds out that, no, sorry, he cannot leave. He must stay for a legally mandated five days.
When he is told this, he is understandably crestfallen, and so are we in the audience. We know: If he's not getting out, we're not either, and at first the prospect of a long stretch doesn't seem promising. How on earth will he fill the time? How will the filmmakers? How will the audience? And then gradually, what seems awful becomes human, what seems foreign becomes familiar, and about halfway into this sincere and surprisingly lovable movie, a vacation feeling sets in. He doesn't want to leave, and neither do we.
