Funny, Slick but Ultimately Rushed, Crime Caper Psycho Therapy Can’t Get its Head Together

Any screenwriter would tell you that beginnings and endings are tricky propositions; elements of a script that have a tendency to stick in the mind of an audience and disproportionately affect how satisfying that story tends to be regarded. Turkish writer-director Tolga Karaçelik’s English language feature debut Psycho Therapy (full name, Psycho Therapy: The Shallow Tale of a Writer Who Decided to Write About a Serial Killer) starts out on a strong note, setting the hook for what looks like a Coen-esque, darkly comedic crime caper, a tale about a disintegrating marriage, a failing career and the brush with murder that just might salvage both or doom everyone involved. If only the film ultimately knew where it was going, the considerable talents of its trifecta of stars could have handily carried it as far as it needed to go. Instead, Psycho Therapy’s screenplay derails it in its closing minutes with genuinely whiplash-inducing abruptness, running out of gas when it’s still seemingly far from its natural finish line. It’s probably been years since I’ve encountered a non-ending that so thoroughly dashes the momentum of what had been a fairly enjoyable narrative.

Keane (John Magaro) is a hapless writer who was cursed with a modicum of early success. Perhaps you know the type–his debut novel moved a few copies, got him on a few year-end lists, and won a small award that means something to him, and him alone. Keane has subsequently allowed this small achievement to insulate him from the world as he spent the last four years working on a tedious follow-up novel involving … the last Neanderthal man, romancing a homo sapiens woman in prehistoric Slovenia. Does Keane know anything about Slovenia, or human evolution? Certainly not, but why let that stop a genius writer at work? He’s a deluded, nebbish fool, the kind of guy who good-naturedly but naively believes that people like and admire him more than they actually do, unable to admit to himself that he knows deep down that his modest early success was a fluke. He can’t even see the mockery of his friends and resentment of his wife when it’s plainly laid out in front of his eyes.

Suzie (Britt Lower) is the wife in question, a successful interior designer and breadwinner who has grown not just resentful of Keane, but possibly homicidal or suicidal. From the moment we first see her, it’s clear that Suzie has fully checked out of the relationship: As the couple leaves a dinner party where Keane unknowingly made a fool of himself, Suzie walks ahead of him in the pouring rain, even as Keane attempts to hold an umbrella above her head. At a red light, she tells him that it is instead green, and her weak-willed husband simply accepts this and rolls forward into the intersection, almost getting the car T-boned by a passing truck. Suzie has grown to hate Keane’s dependence–his trust in her to make decisions for both of them has become a prison. She hates the way she’s forced to live in reality, carrying their shared responsibilities and repercussions, while he lives in a fantasy world of his own devising, retreating into pseudo-intellectual fantasy regarding a book that will never be finished.

It’s no wonder the lady wants a divorce, when Keane is so oblivious that he can’t even see what seems to be her own declining mental state. There’s a deadly passive aggressive seriousness to their exchanges that Severance star Lower sells beautifully, every utterance girded by a soft-spoken, quiet intensity that makes her genuinely absorbing and frightening to watch. We cut to her in the kitchen, Mascara running down her face as we see that she’s slicing a huge pile of onions. “What are you going to do with all of those?” her husband asks, blissfully oblivious to how deranged she looks. “Nothing,” she replies. “I just like the sound.”

Into this fraught equation comes the enigmatic Kollmick (Steve Buscemi), a squirrely but precise man who reveals himself as both a fan of Keane’s work, and shortly afterward as a “retired serial killer” who wants Keane to use him as inspiration for his next book. He’s an interesting mix of eccentric and mildly threatening: When Keane asks “What happens if I say no?”, Kollmick pauses and replies “Why would you?” as if the possibility had never occurred to him. Buscemi’s voice has grown more gravelly and careworn throughout the years, and it helps to impart a bit more gravitas to Kollmick, a character who doesn’t seem like he’d be so easy to push around as the likes of say, Donny in The Big Lebowski. Nevertheless, we can’t exactly take him at his word–although he clearly knows a thing or two about abductions and forensics, we never see any real hard evidence of his past as a serial killer, and it’s entirely possible that he’s just another delusional man who has fixated on the idea of Keane telling his fictional story. Psycho Therapy is not particularly interested in codifying the truths of these characters, which is not a problem in and of itself–it just adds a layer of doubt to everything we’re told.