Toc Toc (2017)

Toc Toc arrives from Spain in 2017, adapted from a French stage comedy by Laurent Baffie, and it wastes no time announcing its subject. Six strangers share an appointment time with a celebrated psychologist who never appears. Each carries a diagnosis: germ phobia, scrupulosity, arithmomania, symmetry obsession, echolalia, and one case of Tourette syndrome complete with coprolalia. The waiting room becomes the entire world of the picture. Doors open, nobody enters, and the clock advances with the patience of a Spanish summer.

This is, by any measure, a film built on neurodivergence. The compulsions are staged for laughs, but the laughter is affectionate and the diagnoses are specific. Blanca cannot touch a surface without reaching for a wipe. Otto will not step on a striped carpet. Federico shouts obscenities he cannot suppress. Over the running time the group stops merely enduring each other and starts offering small, practical kindnesses. A hand touches a shoulder and is not immediately washed. The film argues, quietly, that people living with these conditions understand each other better than any professional might. The closing twist, in which the loudest patient turns out to be the doctor running a covert support group, is a generous joke instead of a cruel one.

Elsewhere the ledger is bare. The cast is uniformly Spanish, the gender politics are those of a pleasant sitcom, and nobody mentions race, money, climate, or the body. The message of tolerance is genuine, but it arrives through farce rather than through sermonizing. A therapeutic comedy of manners, then, and a decent one, filed under a single heading and left there.