Review: Freud's Last Session (2023) dir. Matthew Brown

No film needs to be made. Some films make this more apparent than others. And Freud’s Last Session is one of those films. Avoiding both ideological substance and antagonism between its two leading thinkers, Sigmund Freud (Anthony Hopkins) and C.S. Lewis (Matthew Goode), while simultaneously avoiding a textual commitment to either’s worldview, I’m a bit puzzled at who this film is for. It’s got too much queerness to hit with the American Evangelical crowd that idolizes Lewis, too safe to attract any bibliophilic descendant of Freud, and too non-committal to intrigue the average impartial cinephile.

Matthew Brown’s second feature film, following 2015’s The Man Who Knew Infinity, adapts Mark St. Germain’s stage play, which itself is an adaptation of Armand Nicholi’s 2002 non-fiction book The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life. Unlike Brown’s adaptation, Nicholi’s book does not imagine a fictional encounter between the two 20th-century minds and instead places their writings and thoughts side-by-side to create a topically organized “conversation.” By turning abstract non-fiction into historical fiction, Brown (à la Germain) makes an artistic contribution tantamount to fanfiction. (And not the fun kind either.)

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