Review: ‘Freud’s Last Session’

C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud, together at last!

If a movie ever seemed relevant to my interests, it would be Freud’s Last Session. A dialogue-heavy drama about two intellectual titans debating the existence of God, featuring a starring turn by one of our great actors? Sign me up. 

It’s not just that I love talky dramas and films that probe the deeper questions of life. It’s that, like many Christians, I owe a huge debt to C.S. Lewis. As I’m sure is the case with many, Mere Christianity found me at a crucial time. In my twenties, as I was just starting to examine my beliefs (the first of many deconstructions), it was a guide that proved I didn’t have to abandon intellect to be a follower of Christ. I’ve also been blessed by Lewis’ other writings, notably The Weight of Glory, and, of course, I grew up reading The Chronicles of Narnia. Seeing a movie that brought his voice to life was something I looked forward to. 

Which is why it’s such a huge bummer that Freud’s Last Session really whiffs the opportunity to do much with its premise. 

The film imagines a meeting between Lewis and the father of modern psychiatry in September 1939, on the eve of World War II. Freud is living in London, an exile from Austria after the Nazi invasion. One afternoon, he asks Lewis to pay him a visit, and the two spend the better part of the day talking about sex, mortality, war and God. 

It’s a fascinating idea, putting two near-contemporaries with opposing views into a room and letting them hash it out. And it’s definitely been fodder for others to work with, most notably Armand Nicholi, whose 2003 book The Question of God spends 300 pages examining the philosophies of both men. That book inspired Mark St. Germain to write the play on which this is based. There’s no indication that Lewis and ever did meet – although an unnamed Oxford professor did pay a visit to Freud shortly before his death – but the fact that this is fiction gives the screenwriters and actors license to lean into their perspectives, pushing and arguing as the two talk about life’s biggest issues from opposing sides. 

And certainly there is some of that. Freud and Lewis’s meeting gets off to a bad start when the author apologizes for his satirization of the psychiatrist in The Pilgrim’s Regress; Freud remarks that he hasn’t actually read the book. There’s not an agenda, but it quickly becomes clear that Freud is fascinated by how an Oxford don could believe in religion; he’s even more baffled when he learns that Lewis wasn’t born into his Christian beliefs but rather came to them late in life. Much of the film involves Lewis explaining why he believes not just in a deity but in the Christian God, with Freud attempting to debunk it all as psychological nonsense rooted in a desire for a father figure or sexual repression. 

Freud’s Last Session isn’t a faith-based film, and the script, cowritten by St. Germain and the film’s director, Matt Brown, gives both sides equal weight in their dialogue. Lewis is the more sympathetic character, meek and thoughtful, while Freud – portrayed energetically by Anthony Hopkins – is cantankerous and mischievous. Goode and Hopkins are both strong actors, with Hopkins in particular still throwing fastballs in his 80s (it’s also amusing to watch Hopkins, who played Lewis in Shadowlands, on the opposite side of the debate), although Goode sometimes plays the apologist as a bit too unsure and soft-spoken, with little of the wit and confidence seen in his writing. Their tete-a-tete is often engaging, and whether we’ve heard it all before or not, it’s rare to see a movie give so much time over to questions of meaning, existence and theology. 

The problem is that their dialogue often seems too written. Longtime Lewis readers will quickly understand that most of his dialogue is pulled almost verbatim at times from his books, which leaves the film often feeling like a survey of Lewis’ career. And the conversation is crafted so that every sparring match ends in a draw. In theory, that’s fine; one of the reasons that I stopped reading most apologists is that I don’t think you can argue too far for the existence of God. At a certain point, if you are going to surrender to faith, you have to accept that some mysteries just won’t be solved. I appreciate that about Lewis, and here, Goode’s character acknowledges that he doesn’t have everything figured out, that God is constantly surprising him and upending his expectations. Just as I agree that faith can make room for science but science doesn’t often seem willing to do the same, I agree that sometimes those who don’t share my faith might make points that I can’t argue around. Faith is believing even when you get to the obstacles; it makes room for them and lives with them. I appreciate that this film doesn’t attempt to deliver a haymaker to either side’s beliefs. Its strongest moments are when the arguments sit in the tension between Lewis and Freud’s beliefs and the two men respectfully hold their line without losing respect for the other. 

The problem isn’t that the sparring comes to a détente so much as that you can almost hear the verbal punches being pulled by a screenplay that calculates every word and pushes things along when it comes too close to taking a side. You can see the mechanics of the story-telling; rather than let loose with creativity and imagination about what could have transpired in such a dialogue, we’re reminded over and again that this is structured and calculated, and after five minutes of talk about God, it’s easy to imagine Brown clicking a stopwatch and saying “and now we have to talk about sex; in five more minutes, shift to the war.” Occasionally, the actors rise above the material – and again, if there’s one reason to see this movie, it’s for Hopkins’ performance – but too often they’re bound by a screenplay that feels weirdly episodic instead of focused. 

One of the challenges of adapting a play for the screen is how to keep it from being stage bound. But here, given that there are two fine actors going toe-to-toe, it would seem wiser to lean into the claustrophobia and refuse to leave Freud’s house. Instead, the script tosses in flashbacks, fantasy sequences and air raids to keep the story moving and illustrate the points the two men are making. This hampers the film; rather than focus on a conversation, it distracts and manipulates. There are very few sequences in which the flashbacks to Freud’s childhood or Lewis’s time in the war improve on what’s been conveyed through dialogue, and it robs the actors of a chance to dig into the material. One flashback to Lewis’ association with the Inklings, feels like C.S. Lewis fan fiction, existing for no reason other than to give the film a J.R.R. Tolkien cameo. It also doesn’t help that all the flashbacks and fantasy sequences are filmed in drab tones, lacking the energy or passion that’s palpable in the scenes with Goode and Hopkins going head to head. 

I can see how this material might work well on the stage, where we’re stuck in the same room with only the actors and dialogue to tell the story. The cutaways don’t keep it from being stage bound so much as they untether it from its anchor, and the time spent imagining their lives away from Freud’s office just means there’s less time to watch the characters banter. A subplot regarding Freud’s lesbian daughter attempts to say something about the psychiatrist’s domineering paternal instincts and how he may have alienated himself from his child, but there’s simply too much going on in the movie for it to give any thoughtful time to it. The fact that the film backs away from both characters’ thoughts on homosexuality – probably because Lewis and Freud both held views on the subject that would be considered problematic by audiences – only further robs it of power. 

In the end, I don’t know who this is for. Mainstream audiences will likely find it too ponderous and staid. Those who’ve studied Freud and Lewis will likely roll their eyes and find it too shallow. It’s too considerate of Freud’s atheism to work for the faith-based crowd, while those who don’t want their cinema to proselytize will likely pick up on the fact that Lewis is often portrayed in a kindlier light – and it’s he who gets the film’s emotional catharsis. It’s a film of ideas, some of them intriguing, but unfortunately never knows what to do with them. A shame; I wish this were better.