This melodramatic two-hander is based around the fact that weeks before his death, psychologist Sigmund Freud (played here by Anthony Hopkins) was visited by an unknown Oxford academic. The film imagines that it was C.S. Lewis (Matthew Goode), the famed author of the Narnia books who would have fit the description (as would many others, but where’s the fun in that?). With Britain on the verge of World War 2, the pair trade jabs about faith, their past, and mankind’s future.
What follows is a very talky two hours that often feels like listening in on a stranger’s argument. God takes up a lot of the discussion, with Hopkins’ Freud a committed atheist, while Lewis had recently returned to his faith. At times it feels like a handsomely mounted squabble, with flashbacks that would have been better suited as a well-written speech.
It’s based on a play, and the staginess of the story weighs down the pace of the film, wasting two talented performers on a theological discussion that doesn’t really go anywhere. The trailer for the film grandly declares that “Anthony Hopkins IS Sigmund Freud”, but in reality he’s very much Anthony Hopkins. All the impassioned ranting and, let’s face it, scenery chewing is present, he just substitutes W’s for V’s to mimic an Austrian accent.
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When it work’s it’s glorious, as we’ve seen in his better performances, but without greater substance it’s just him shouting in a church. Goode, the Watchmen star once considered for Bond and Superman, gives Lewis a charming but intense air. His job is to not rise to Freud’s bait, however, so he feels overshadowed at times. Hopkins has appeared in similar films before, such as 2019’s The Two Popes which dramatized the relationship between the last two Pontiffs.
However, Freud’s Last Session never seems to give us a reason to care about what’s happening, making it feel like a lifeless lecture.
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