Director: Dillon Tucker
OCD rarely gets an honest screen portrait; "Pure O" (2024) builds its entire drama around the quieter, more invasive form of the condition known by the same name.
What is Pure O about?
The film centers on a rehab counselor whose professional life is built around helping others hold themselves together, until a diagnosis of Pure O — a subtype of obsessive-compulsive disorder defined by intrusive thoughts rather than visible rituals — throws his own sense of stability into question. Daniel Dorr plays the counselor as someone whose job suddenly becomes a mirror he can't look away from, forced to sit with the same doubts about his mind that his clients bring to him every day. Hope Lauren and Landry Bender appear as people in his orbit navigating the fallout as his condition becomes harder to hide, while his addiction-recovery clients end up offering him a kind of support he never expected to need. Rather than treating the diagnosis as a plot twist to resolve, the film stays with the slow, difficult work of learning to live alongside intrusive thoughts, using the recovery-group setting to show how community and honesty can function as genuine tools rather than a tidy narrative device.
Cast & crew
Daniel Dorr carries the film's emotional weight in a role that asks for restraint rather than big dramatic swings, communicating internal panic through small physical tics and pauses. Hope Lauren and Landry Bender give the counselor's outside relationships texture, and the recovery-group ensemble, including Candice Renee and Breon Gorman, keeps the film's community scenes feeling lived-in rather than staged.
Context & significance
Pure O released in 2024 as part of a small but growing wave of independent dramas willing to depict mental health conditions from the inside rather than through outside symptoms alone. At 116 minutes, the film gives itself room to sit with the counselor's process rather than rushing toward a clean resolution, which suits a subject matter that resists easy narrative closure.
Where & how to watch
Pure O can be watched on K-Time after signing in with a free account — the page itself is free to read regardless. K-Time's interface is designed around a Farsi-first experience for Persian-speaking audiences abroad, so even an English-language independent drama like this one is easy to search, subtitle, and navigate without friction.