Review: Freud’s Last Sesson

By John Corrado

Freud’s Last Session is a period drama that imagines a fictionalized conversation between Sigmund Freud (Anthony Hopkins) and C.S. Lewis (Matthew Goode) two days after the start of World War II on September 3rd, 1939.

The meeting takes place at Freud’s home in London, with the psychoanalyst and staunch atheist having invited author and Oxford professor Lewis over to discuss his recent conversion to Christianity. Lewis has published The Pilgrim’s Regress, a work that Freud is eager to challenge, debating the young writer’s newfound belief in God.

Directed by Matt Brown (The Man Who Knew Infinity), Freud’s Last Session is based on a play by Mark St. Germain that was in turn inspired by Armand Nicholi’s non-fiction book The Question of God, which presented the differing arguments of Freud and Lewis side by side. Because there is no historical record that these two men actually met (though it is possible that they did), the script imagines how such a meeting might have gone based on their writing and differing viewpoints on faith.

While Freud’s Last Session features a pair of expectedly good performances from Hopkins (who played Lewis himself in the 1993 biopic Shadowlands) and Goode, it doesn’t fully live up to the central promise of staging an imagined conversation between these two men. Much less effective is the film’s overuse of flashbacks, and a subplot involving Freud’s over-dependent daughter Anna (Liv Lisa Fries), which tries to work in “daddy issues” themes from his writing, but feels hackneyed in execution.

There are some interesting conversations, and the scenes where it’s just Hopkins’ Freud and Goode’s Lewis debating morality are the strongest, but the writing doesn’t go as deep as it could have. As stagey as it sometimes feels, this is a film that actually would have benefitted from being simply a battle of ideas between these two great thinkers (more like The Two Popes, which cast Hopkins as Pope Benedict). By trying to work in so much else around their meeting, it breaks up the flow and makes the film feel more melodramatic and less focused.

Film Rating: ★★ (out of 4)