Steve Carell and Domhnall Glesson are the protagonists of ‘The Patient’.
Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg are responsible for this dark fiction excellently interpreted by Steve Carell and Domhnall Gleeson
There is no greater satisfaction for those who dedicate themselves professionally to writing about series and films than pressing play and discovering that the new television fiction that they have been entrusted to cover has chapters of only twenty minutes or that that feature film that they are going to see in a privileged pass, just a few days before the film opens in theaters, it adjusts to that hour and a half that some conceive as the perfect duration to tell 90% of the stories. In an age where production is huge, time is money.
That’s why when one approaches a bleak and complex psychological drama like ‘The Patient’, organized into ten episodes, most of which do not last thirty minutes, one cannot help but smile. The fiction created by Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg, responsible for ‘The Americans’, for FX and which can be seen here on Star, the adult label of Disney+, allocates to each episode the footage it should have, neither more nor less. It should not be adjusted to specific times -there are episodes of 20 minutes and others of 45 or 46- and that, far from disorienting the viewer, reinforces a narrative that goes on a crescendo and that goes from the initial shock and horror, to boredom and despair. .
Because ‘The Patient’ follows in the footsteps of Dr. Alan Strauss, a psychotherapist who one bad day wakes up disoriented in a room he does not recognize, literally chained at the foot of a bed that is not his. Frightened, he begins to ask for help, but no one seems to hear his screams. A quick look at the room, arranged in the basement of a house, makes it clear that he has been kidnapped: there are his toothpaste and toothbrush, his pills and a tube of cream for foot fungus. In another corner, a roll of toilet paper and a chamber pot. His anxiety devours him.
His kidnapper is Sam Fortner, an inspector who is dedicated to examining the healthiness of the city’s restaurants, who has been going to Dr. Strauss’s office hidden behind sunglasses and under another name. After several sessions in which the only thing the psychologist has made clear is that he is not happy and his father beat him, Strauss tells him that if he doesn’t open up more, they won’t be able to do anything. Sam decides to capture him, and this is where you have to suspend disbelief, to carry out extreme therapy in the basement of his house. The reason? He has a drive that leads him to murder whom he believes that he is not doing the right thing.
From there an intelligent drama develops with touches of survival that fundamentally addresses the difficulties in parent-child relationships, lack of communication or disappointment and that is not constrained to the four walls in which the doctor is trapped, skillfully interpreted by the great Steve Carell. And it is that his confinement leads him to dive with his mind through the past, gradually revealing issues such as his family life, the recent loss of his wife, due to cancer, the ‘rebelliousness’ of a son who did not finish being as they wanted or the importance of the Jewish tradition within the family. And, at the same time, he psychoanalyzes himself, trying to mend the break in his own family, and imagining ways to get out of a prison that seems increasingly final. All while he tries to treat a desperate patient with his unhappiness, who he claims to be aware of not being normal but doesn’t feel crazy either, in a deeply psychological duel of intelligence and intellectual resistance.
With few touches of humor, almost all coming from Sam -his “passion” for country music is already a joke-, the character played by a fabulous emotionless and robotic Domhnall Gleeson that the series discovers little by little, the Fiction, with simple but effective photography and music, hides more than one unexpected surprise in its development as it becomes more and more anguishing and establishes conversations about love, the Jewish religion, vital in the development of the serial, machismo, the mourning for the death of a loved one, the absence or empathy.
Despite its obvious achievements, there is, however, some narrative decision that seems like nonsense – that eureka moment! through an interview with the serial killer Edmund Kemper- and an ending that also raises some doubts, but that does not cloud a fascinating journey through the recesses of the human soul and mind.
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