Mad to Be Normal review – Tennant returns as a very different doctor

David Tennant gives a brilliant performance as RD Laing, the radical psychiatrist who rewrote the rules on mental health treatment

David Tennant is on pugnacious, mercurial and beady-eyed form in this very interesting and absorbing film. It's one of his best performances. He plays the psychiatrist RD Laing, who became a 60s counterculture hero for challenging what he saw as the profession's heartless prison-hospital ethos of tranquillisers and electroconvulsive shock treatment. Instead, Laing proposed a holistic treatment without drugs (although medically licensed LSD was acceptable), using group therapy and communal healing. He set up a refuge at Kingsley Hall in east London, that was regarded suspiciously as something like a Bedlam cult.

Related: Kingsley Hall: RD Laing's experiment in anti-psychiatry