"The most beautiful and terrible film –  sublime visually –  beyond all experience, beyond all hope." Thea Porter

"One of the most uncompromisingly radical feminist films ever made in Britain (and, almost unbelievably, the only 1970s British feature film solo-directed by a woman), Jane Arden's THE OTHER SIDE OF THE UNDERNEATH is a fractured study of highly disturbed young women undergoing therapy in a run-down Victorian-era asylum in the deceptively idyllic Welsh countryside. It remains that rarest of beasts: a film that takes female mental illness and its various manifestations and ramifications wholly seriously.
Very loosely adapted from Arden's 1971 multimedia stage piece "A New Communion for Freaks, Prophets and Witches", the film blends conventional dramatic performance (Arden herself plays a psychiatrist), nightmarishly symbolic hallucinations, actual group therapy sessions and a grotesque pagan 'festival' in which the use of real 'outcasts' (people genuinely ostracised by conventional society, often for mental-health reasons) arguably tips the film over into outright exploitation, only defensible as part of Arden's desire to shake her audience out of any lingering complacency at every possible opportunity." Michael Brooke, British Film Institute

"A descent into what is called '‘madness' or '‘schizophrenia' demands a radical break from cinematic conventions and Jane Arden has achieved a major breakthrough. The movie follows the death and rebirth of a human being in terms which echo the world of R.D. Laing and David Cooper. At the same time it promises a rebirth of the cinema. It is a terrifying, haunting, and enriching experience." David Will, Edinburgh Film Festival 1972