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

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.

What Psycho Therapy develops into is a comedy of errors and concussions, as a quickly snowballing sequence of misunderstandings makes Suzie believe that Kollmick is a marriage counselor, resulting in a series of unconventional, talky therapy sessions between husband and wife, which slow the pace considerably but do admittedly help flesh out the dynamic of the characters. Suzie remains somewhat underwritten in spite of it, and the film leans on Lower’s performance more than anything it tells us about her character to get across her mysterious mixture of cold aloofness and then building excitement as she seems oddly energized–almost titillated?–by the realization that her husband may have a new, secret nighttime life with a dangerous accomplice. Lower fascinatingly makes Suzie feel both paranoid and assured simultaneously–severe, like the razor sharp line of her fastidiously manicured bangs. Frustratingly, she spends much of the story simply tailing behind the action, until the film finally ropes her in as a full conspirator in what turns out to be its closing moments. By the way: Those excited for a miniature Severance reunion between Lower and actress Sydney Cole Alexander (who plays Natalie on the Apple TV+ series) will likely be disappointed, given that Alexander’s Zoe turns out to be a largely superfluous friend of Suzie’s, with only a minute or so of unimportant screen time.

Nevertheless, Psycho Therapy often thrives in its bleak, morbid humor as it tells a story propelled by consistent screw-ups and comedic misunderstandings, of the sort that might typify a Shakespearean (or Guy Ritchian) “comedy of doors.” People get pistol-whipped, inadvertently knocked out via chloroform, and threatened with messy demises. Despite a predominantly comedic slant, the film also manages significant levels of tension at times. It helps that visually, it looks great–there’s consistently engaging use of stylized lighting from DP Natalie Kingston, especially in nighttime outdoor scenes, frequently lit by the splashy glow of traffic lights and billboards. Contrasting cold and warm tones are used throughout, particularly in nighttime sequences on the streets of Chinatown, where everything is drenched in a sort of unearthly, sickly fusion of orange and green. Shadows dapple the faces of Magaro, Buscemi and Lower in a way that can’t help but evoke beloved big city noirs.

But then … that ending. Right around the point in the narrative that most crime capers in the mold of Psycho Therapy would be gearing up for their third acts, this film instead slams into its own end credits with an ending so abrupt that it can scarcely be believed. It quite frankly plays out as if the film was being shot in chronological order, and just ran out of budget in its final scheduled week, its cast and crew forced to go home before any concluding material could be filmed. None of its narrative throughlines really see any kind of proper conclusion: Not Keane’s breaking bad or delusional view of his art; not Suzie’s seemingly emerging psychopathy; not … whatever the hell is going on with Kollmick’s desire to turn his life experience into Keane’s novel. It feels like an entire act is missing, that the character relationships have been building toward a showdown that never properly arrives. In its fleeting, final moments, Psycho Therapy suggests that Keane and Suzie are doomed to be stuck in a love-hate dynamic for eternity, but this doesn’t come close to satisfyingly shutting the door on what had been an engaging story driven forward by really solid performances from all three of its core cast.

Karaçelik’s film is sadly marred by this sudden loss of momentum, leaving the sort of bitter aftertaste one might expect to experience after ingesting the poison Suzie at one point fears her foolish husband might be slipping her. And as with that toxin, by the time it becomes clear that something is wrong, it’s already too late to make amends.

Director: Tolga Karaçelik
Writer: Tolga Karaçelik
Stars: John Magaro, Britt Lower, Steve Buscemi
Release date: April 4, 2025

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter or on Bluesky for more film writing.