Smooth and enjoyable as a gorgeous piece of chamber music, director Matt Brown‘s triangulated two-hander waltz of brilliant minds, Freud’s Last Session (2023), is based on the play of the same name by Mark St. Germain, which, in turn, was inspired by a book called The Question of God, written by Armand Nicholi Jr.. Both its stage roots and its intellectualism are visible and unapologetic, giving it core strength, as well as presenting its only (minor) flaw: its insular appeal.
Starting and ending in the span of a single day leading into WWII (with precisely placed flashbacks), Hitler’s speech on the radio ominously filling the sophisticated sanctum of one of the greatest minds of the XX century — Sigmund Freud, himself, is pacing nervously about, gamely inhabited by Sir Anthony Hopkins, mannerisms of a crotchety genius nailed down to a tee. Irked, defiant, and dislocated in his exile in London, Freud is pining for Vienna, knowing full well he will never see his hometown again.
The pestilence spreading from the radio waves and into the streets of the metropolis catches people hurriedly evacuating to the countryside, as an attack on Britain is imminent. Waiting for the train, making his way to London to meet Freud, is the writer and scholar C.S. Lewis, played by an earnest and world-weary Matthew Goode. The meeting is fictional, or rather apocryphal, as Freud did meet with a freshly minted Oxford don right about then, at the very beginning of the Second World War, and only a week before his own death, by assisted suicide.
Freud’s mouth cancer is also part of this story. A character almost, in its own horrific right. Always making sure that his cyanide pill is at the ready, and his morphine on the way, as if his end was scheduled according to a Swiss watch — Freud had his appointment with death designed to perfection.
Europe’s appointment with death is also inevitable. While the father of psychoanalysis lashes out at his dutiful daughter Anna (a vulnerable, intense Liv Lisa Fries), an analyst in her own right, in a relationship with her colleague Dorothy (Jodi Balfour), an affair Freud professionally accepts, but privately denies — all the world is at a standstill, waiting for the blade of the axe to drop.
This ongoing emotional tension between a co-dependent father and daughter acts as a messy interlude before the collective storm, one which brings them together, as family, one last time.
The photography, by Ben Smithard, amplifies the impending doom, with its muted leather-bound interiors and metallic grey skies, capturing the atmosphere of a country both rushed and frozen, equally. All the kingdom determined to make it to safety on time, it seems only the (future) author of The Chronicles of Narnia is moving in the opposite direction, running late, which, naturally, annoys Freud, to no end.
When the younger man finally does make it, he is sniffed out by Freud’s dog, as if he arrived at a police station, not a cordial visit to a fellow scholar — to discuss lofty topics (and his own Christianity, which also annoys Freud, particularly). A non-believer, who created a new sort of a religion, and a believer, and former atheist, who found religion in the pits of the Great War, lock horns, feverishly discussing Lewis’s book on religion, one which Freud claims to have not read, yet objects to, quite specifically. C.S. Lewis, with his severe PTSD, finds in Freud a formidable counterpart, and an strangely apt ally, one that actually understands, in depth, the consequences of trauma.
As they converse, at length, about the meaning of god in a godless world, in this elegant meditation on mortality — the end of the world begins.
An under-the-radar gem.
★★★★☆
Author: ©Milana Vujkov
Lola On Film 