109 min | PG-13 | December 22, 2023 | Sony Pictures Classics
Sigmund Freud summons C. S. Lewis to his London study on the day Britain enters the war. The dying atheist and the converted believer argue about God for an afternoon. The debate is real. The movie around it is furniture.
It is September 1939. Sigmund Freud, exiled in London and dying of oral cancer, invites the Oxford don C. S. Lewis to his home for a single conversation. Freud is an atheist staring down his own death. Lewis is a former atheist who found God in the trenches and the years after. The film stages their meeting as a debate about whether God exists, conducted while air-raid sirens warn of the war beginning outside. The subject is enormous and the film keeps shrinking it into a string of polite talking points.
Anthony Hopkins plays Freud with a prosthetic palate and a constant wince, and he builds the performance around physical pain. He fingers his jaw, he gags on his own speech, he wields cruelty as a defense against fear. Hopkins makes the dying man more compelling than the argument he is making. Matthew Goode plays Lewis with warmth and caution, but the script hands him conviction without struggle. Liv Lisa Fries plays Anna Freud as a daughter trapped in her father’s gravity, and her scenes with Jodi Balfour as Dorothy Burlingham carry a buried tension the central debate never reaches.
Matthew Brown directs from a script he wrote with Mark St. Germain, adapted from St. Germain’s stage play. The theatrical origin shows in every scene. Brown tries to open up the single room with flashbacks to Lewis in the war and Freud in Vienna, and the cutaways drain the pressure instead of building it. The production design renders the cluttered study with care, every antiquity and Persian rug in place. The film keeps fleeing that room when the room is the only thing that works.
The premise promises a collision between two of the sharpest minds of the century. The execution turns it into a sampler of theological positions, each raised and dropped before it can cut. Brown wants the war, the cancer, the daughter, and the debate to amplify one another, and instead they compete for a runtime that cannot hold them all. Hopkins is worth watching because Hopkins is always worth watching. The film never earns the conversation it built itself around.