These Two Hands – The Story Of Bowen Therapy (2023) – Handy

These Two Hands – The Story Of Bowen Therapy is available as part of the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival

Tom Bowen was born in 1916 and lived a seemingly normal life working as a concreter in Victoria until he developed a system that would come to be known as the Bowen Technique. The idea was that a certain set of hand movements on someone’s skin could alleviate chronic pain permanently, which it allegedly did to the thousands of people who passed through Bowen’s care. After leaving concreting, Bowen’s practice became so busy he would often see between 65-100 patients a day until his passing in 1982. The man’s work and his life story are the central subject of These Two Hands – The Story Of Bowen Therapy and it’s certainly interesting… let’s start with that.

These Two Hands – The Story Of Bowen Therapy is comprised of a set of interviews with people who either knew Tom Bowen, were treated by him, were related to him or have gone to learn a variation of his technique (since he apparently never wrote anything down so people basically just had to learn from watching him do it, like medicinal telephone). Between these interviews are dramatic recreations of several moments in the lives of Tom and those who worked with him, all underscored by a constant soundtrack that sounds a little bit like a stock music library’s response to the prompt ‘angelic’. Throughout the documentary we are filled in on Tom’s work, how many people he ‘healed’ with his work and how much of an impact he made on their lives.

The first thing you’ll note about These Two Hands – The Story Of Bowen Therapy is that it’s not subtle about what side it’s on, this is not an objective documentary that’s going to examine this from an outside perspective and talk about it. Hell, this is borderline evangelical in how much it wants to praise the glory of Bowen Therapy to its audience of people. Now, at no point does it describe Bowen Therapy other than basically demonstrating what looks like the lightest massage you’ve ever seen in your life, but the way it talks about it you would think Bowen’s hands were comparable to Jesus’ hands with how much he’s being praised in this film.

Now there is of course no rule that says every documentary needs to be objective, in fact trying to do so would be fairly boring but in this case, the lack of objectivity sets off alarm bells every time someone speaks. They talk about this in the same breathless tone people talk about magnet therapy or homeopathy or any other bit of alternative medicine that doesn’t have any actual effect and it’s hard to not question just what the purpose of this is. No one seems to be able to explain what it’s actually doing, it has the air of “it works if you believe it works” and as someone who tends to have a problem with that, I found it hard to get on board with this therapy.

It doesn’t help that the presentation here is not great, the dramatic recreations, in particular, have the feeling of a uni student’s final project where the actors are the other students. It even looks like they just had one room to shoot in and swapped corners any time they needed to pretend they were somewhere else, combined with wooden acting and a colour grade that looks like they changed nothing from the raw footage and it’s just hard to get invested in the story being told (which is a shame because some of these stories are fascinating on some level). 

Underneath all this is a constant piece of annoying music that feels like it’s looping over and over again at the same volume as the interviews which can make it harder to hear them while also just being generally annoying. It’s hard enough to take in this lengthy history without the sound mix making things difficult.

Look, These Two Hands – The Story Of Bowen Therapy is not exactly meant for someone like me. It feels like it’s promoting pseudo-science to a desperate audience and the sales tactic is designed in a way to put off people who might question it. There is some stuff here that’s interesting, in that same way that a lot of films evangelising a certain thing can be interesting due to the passion and devotion of those involved, but there are just too many red flags going off to make this a must-see.