Psycho Therapy (2025)
Premise: Keane (not Keanu) has been kind of writing his next novel for the last four, five years, and the only thing he has to show is one of the most terrible premises ever (I kid you not, the genre could be “neanderthal love story (in slovenia)” and I’m not sure how many bad books you’ve read but it makes me shiver). Surprising no one, Keane’s wife Suzie one day tells him she wants to divorce him.
Keane also meets Steve Buscemi, a fan who tells him he loved his first and only book and would want to give him an idea for the next one: write about a serial killer. But, here’s the twist: Good Ol’ Steve is a retired serial killer, so he’s ready to offer his help as a consultant of sorts. And he starts doing that! Except - there’s a misunderstanding and suddenly Suzie thinks Steve Buscemi is a marriage counselor. This alone would be bad enough, but on top of that Mr Buscemi starts giving Keane some books with suggestive titles (“toxicology”, “how to get away with murder”, “autopsies” and so on), so Suzie comes to the conclusion that her dumb as hell husband plants to kill her.
So, a farce, which is one of my favourite genres. What could go wrong?
Under 90 minutes? Inexplicably 100 minutes long.
Do they say the title? No. Then again, the actual full title is (take a deep breath) Psycho Therapy: The Shallow Tale of a Writer Who Decided to Write About a Serial Killer. I think it might be a bit hard to drop that in a conversation but I still think it’s doable.
One sentence review:
Okay, more: There are a few moments that are really funny, specially the two main “therapy” scenes that are extremely hilarious if you’ve ever had to deal with a coach in a work environment and you can tell they’re mostly just winging all that bullshit. The problem is that this movie should have been called Wasted Opportunities (And A Rushed Ending) because what the hell happened. We spend so long with what amounts to bad padding (the wife following the husband while virtually nothing really happens), then suddenly the movie is over. Sure they want to make a point with that ending but, come on. Too bad.
A simple way to improve it: More therapy sessions with Buscemi trying to guess what he should say so everyone believes he’s an actual marriage counselor.
Trivia about the IMDb trivia:
Look, the trivia this time sucked hard (it was literally “two of the actors have been together in Severance”, which is like “okay”) so instead I’ll say I found it extremely relatable when the movie made its best to show how the main character’s a total failure of a writer who somehow managed to publish one book, got a really crappy tiny award for it and definitely spends a lot of the day thinking about how Important it is that he’s a writer, he writes, the art of the penmanship, how good he is at this craft, browsing r/typewriters and r/writershumor and so on instead of like, doing anything else.
Yup, I know more than one person like that!
