Freud’s Last Session: Film Review
Anthony Hopkins and Matthew Goode are fine actors but even they can’t rescue Freud’s Last Session, which is plagued by writing and editing issues.
The film, based on the play by Mark St. Germain, takes place in the London home of Sigmund Freud (Hopkins) in September 1939, three weeks before he dies amid a battle with oral cancer. Set two days into World War II, the film imagines a meeting between the founder of psychoanalysis and the author C.S. Lewis (Goode).
In the imagined meeting, which may or may not have happened in real life, the scholars discuss death, suicide and the trauma of war but they mostly dissect their opposing ideas about God and religion; Lewis has faith while Freud is a staunch atheist. However, the most interesting topic to me was the examination of Freud’s co-dependent relationship with his daughter Anna (Liv Lisa Fries).
There are juicy, compelling glimmers of conversation but they are not followed through to a satisfying conclusion. The film keeps cutting away to flashbacks or moving on to a different topic of discussion. I know it’s natural in a conversation so move onto a different subject before finishing the one you’re on but this approach left me with so many questions. I ended up reading up on Lewis to find out more about his friendship with Janie Moore and why he turned his back on atheism.
To bring some visual variety and show rather than tell, there are a lot of flashbacks. While I appreciated that it wasn’t literally two men talking in a study for the whole film, the flashbacks kept cutting into the main conversation and some of them were unnecessary. Honestly, the editing of this film is all over the place, leaving the narrative feeling scattershot, haphazard and unfocused. Just tell the story!
Hopkins always delivers so it’s no surprise he does so again here. It’s interesting to see Freud at a dark time in his life when he’s thinking of ending it. While I liked his performance, I couldn’t figure out why he spoke with an English accent rather than an Austrian one. It was more of a glaring choice because Fries (a German actress) used her accent to play his daughter. Despite the two male leads being more established, Fries was my favourite and I found her character more interesting.
Freud’s Last Session is a frustrating film because it doesn’t make the most of its compelling moments or see them through properly.
In cinemas from Friday 14th June