Freud’s Last Session [Review]
Director Matthew Brown adapted Mark St. Germain’s 2009 off-Broadway play to the screen to bring us Freud’s Last Session. The film imagines a meeting between psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (Anthony Hopkins) and author C.S. Lewis (Matthew Goode). Freud, a Jewish atheist, called on Lewis, an atheist converted to devout believer, to discuss how Lewis could believe in God on an intellectual level. The fictional meeting takes place in 1939, on the day Germany invades Poland and WWII begins, three weeks before Freud’s death. The film takes place over that afternoon and evening, aside from a smattering of flashbacks.
Image: Sony Pictures Classics
Meanwhile, we also follow Anna Freud (Liv Lisa Fries), Sigmund’s daughter, as she struggles to balance her codependence with her father with her desire to teach and her romantic relationship with Dorothy Burlingham (Jodi Balfour). While Anna and Dorothy are compelling characters, their subplot distracts from the core draw of the film, the meeting of these two colossal minds. Fries as Anna Freud could easily carry her own film, as her relationships and fame as mother of child psychoanalysis are fascinating in their on right, rather than being relegated to a distraction. Likewise, flashbacks to Freud and Lewis’ childhoods and to Lewis’ WWI experiences only serve to deflate the energy at the core of the film.
Arguing against the inclusion of these subplots runs counter to my first impression of the film, which is that it doesn’t escape the feeling of being made for the stage—it’s simply not very cinematic. In my view, the film should have embraced that about itself and bet it all on Hopkins and Goode together in a room, rather than taking us away whenever things begin to crackle.
Freud’s Last Session is the type of movie that lives or dies by its actors’ performances, and they certainly deliver, especially Hopkins. I’d recommend this film to anyone on the strength of his performance alone, even though the movie’s execution is uneven and its structure flawed.
Freud’s Last Session will open in New York and Los Angeles on December 22, 2023. Other markets will follow.
