We Come to Bury Freud, Not to Praise Him: A Film Review of Freud’s Last Session, directed by Matt Brown, starring Anthony Hopkins, Matthew Goode, and Liv Lisa Fries (2023)

Freud was not a fan of cinema or of his would-be biographers and we might reasonably assume he would have cast an at least equally jaundiced eye on cinematic Freudian biopics. If he had troubled himself to follow this sub-genre of films, he would have had plenty of material on which to reflect: there have been perhaps 150 portrayals of Freud in cinema internationally (Schwartz & Qedar, 2025). It is doubtful whether any of these offerings would have prompted Freud to change his views on the subject.

The latest film in this category, Freud’s Last Session, written primarily by Mark St Germain and directed by Matt Brown, was initially released in June 2024. It is a very disappointing work, involving at best an ungenerous reading of Freud, which too often descends into a hostile attack on Freud’s character, utilizing a hotchpotch of poorly digested biographical claims. The film itself followed St Germain’s 2009 stage play of the same name, which in its turn had been inspired by Armand Nicholi’s 2002 book The Question of God. Freud

met an Oxford don when he was living out his final days in London, having escaped Nazi Vienna in June 1938. Nicoli had imagined the supposedly unnamed academic might have been the Christian apologist C. S. Lewis, and St Germain took this idea up in his stage play and the subsequent film, setting the action over a single day, September 3, 1939, the day Britain entered World War II. Situating the story on that day, and a mere 20 days before Freud’s death, was a plot device intended to ratchet up the wider contextual tension and to inflect the portent of the Freud–Lewis debate: on the existence or otherwise of God and on the nature of good and evil.

St Germain’s stage play had restricted its focus to that imagined encounter an