Limp and lifeless: Freud’s Last Session reviewed

Freud’s Last Session stars Anthony Hopkins and Matthew Goode and is a work of speculative fiction asking what would have happened if Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis had met to debate the existence of God. What if two of the greatest minds of the 20th century had the chance to thrash it out? Thrash it out they do but, alas, they cannot thrash any life into this film. If you are planning to see it at the cinema, a few espressos beforehand may not go amiss.

It is directed by Matthew Brown, who co-wrote the script with Mark St Germain, on whose play it is based. It takes place on 3 September 1939, the day Chamberlain declared war after Hitler invaded Poland. Freud, an atheist, has invited Lewis, a man of deep Christian faith, to his Hampstead home. He has issued this invitation, he says, ‘because I want to know why a man of your supreme intellect could abandon truth and embrace an insidious lie’. Freud has jaw cancer, which is making his life intolerable. He’s in horrific pain and, given the film’s title, we know he won’t last for long. Is he seeking some last-minute reason to believe in God to offset his own terrors? And is this all happening because Europe is on the brink of conflict? The film doesn’t drill down sufficiently into its own conceit to tell us anything about that.

To counter the usual inertness of a two-hander, Freud is kept on the move, going from this room to that, out into the garden and back inside again. I kept wanting to shout at the screen: ‘For pity’s sake, let the poor old fella have a sit! Can’t you see he’s on his last legs?’ That’s about as roused, or as emotionally invested, as I ever got.