This article focuses on the visual representation of psychiatric internment within the framework of Franco Basaglia’s project which resulted in the approval, in 1978, of the “Legge 180,” the first law in the world which imposed the closure of asylums. It explores the subject of the material and immaterial thresholds of asylums on the basis of some examples from the recent Italian film production: La pecora nera (2006) by Ascanio Celestini, La meglio gioventù (2003) by Marco Tullio Giordana, C’era una volta la città dei matti (2010) by Marco Turco, and La pazza gioia (2016) by Paolo Virzì. The perception of crossing the threshold is a complex psychic issue both when it refers to crossing material doors and windows and to crossing the imaginary lines of an inner boundary. Thinking at the psychiatric hospital as a heterotopia of deviation (Foucault), characterized by a system of opening/closing spaces and by a process of inclusion/exclusion of individuals, enables to grasp the effects of the “objectification” (Basaglia) suffered by inmates after long periods of internment: men and women had been “institutionalized”: they had become what the asylum expected from them, and they no longer felt free to move and leave the psychiatric hospital.