Film · 2020 · Films · 2020s
Words on Bathroom Walls
Scored from 109 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2020s (7,930 peers).
Summary
Thor Freudenthal's adaptation of Julia Walton's novel follows Adam Petrazelli (Charlie Plummer), a high-school senior who wants to be a chef and is expelled after a hallucination during a chemistry lab ends in an accident; he is then diagnosed with schizophrenia. Sent to a Catholic school for his final year and enrolled in a trial for an experimental drug, he hides the diagnosis from everyone there, especially Maya (Taylor Russell), the valedictorian who tutors him. His hallucinations appear as three constant companions — a serene free spirit, a swaggering motormouth and a silent bodyguard — alongside a voice inside a cloud of black smoke. Andy Garcia plays the priest Adam ends up confiding in as the drug's side effects mount.
Released in 2020, Words on Bathroom Walls is a drama and romance film. Its country of origin is listed as the United States. It runs 1h 51m. Its certificate is PG-13.
The calibrated figure is built from 109 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 116 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. 7,929 other films from the 2020s form the cohort it is ranked inside. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 93 of whom clear the calibration test.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where Words on Bathroom Walls lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 2020s (7,930 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 109.
Cohort: Films · 2020s
