The 2023 AFI Festival featured over 100 films including the world premiere of Freud’s Last Session. The Sony Pictures Classics film was written by Mark St. Germain, directed by Matt Brown, and stars Anthony Hopkins and Matthew Goode.

Plot: It tells of a meeting between C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud and the debate on God that follows and discussions of the nature of their relationships with other people such as Freud’s daughter.

When the film begins, we meet Sigmund Freud, who struggles with his health and can’t teach as much as he used to. He relies heavily on his daughter Anna to help him get around, take his medicine, and even teach his classes at the college. As a war plays in the story’s backdrop, everything leads to a meeting of Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis, who discuss everything from sex to God and Lewis’s life post-war. 

As you are watching Freud’s Last Session, you can very much tell the film was based on a play. Unlike the 2020 film The Father, this film is unable to take the play out of the film and make it stand out on its own. It feels overly stagey, and because of that, it’s a little harder to connect on the surface.

That said, you do get mesmerized by the heavy dialogue and back-and-forth chess match between Anthony Hopkins as Freud and Matthew Goode as C.S. Lewis. The back-and-forth banter about God’s true existence was like watching two titans go to battle back, and it was often mesmerizing to watch. Goode and Hopkins are magnificent and do their part in elevating the film. 

Overall, Freud’s Last Session is shaky in its foundation with its struggle to balance Freud’s daughter’s storyline, appears to be overly stage-play-like, and fails to deliver on the emotional core that Matt Brown attempts to. Even with my issues with the film’s core, Hopkins and Goode’s performances make this a must-watch. 

Freud’s Last Session hits theaters on December 22, 2023