FREUD’S LAST SESSION Special Screenings

World Premiere

Screening to be followed by a conversation with director Matt Brown.

London, 1939. On the eve of the Second World War, the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (Anthony Hopkins), hosts Oxford don and committed Christian C.S. Lewis (Matthew Goode) at his Hampstead home. Lewis, who would later author “The Chronicles of Narnia,” had recently written a minor fantasy novel that lightly spoofed the great doctor from Vienna and is sheepishly apologetic about it. Freud finds Lewis’ firm faith in a higher being unpersuasive at best, and prefers instead to explore the unexamined corners in Lewis’ life: his relationships to his late mother and his estranged father, his PTSD following service in the Great War, and his unusual relationship with his live-in companion, Janie Moore (Orla Brady), the mother of a fallen comrade. But then Freud, too, is tuning out things in his life: the need for his daughter Anna (Liv Lisa Fries) to live her life authentically, the seriousness of his cancer and worsening drug dependency, and the outbreak of war on the radio news. Directed by Matt Brown (THE MAN WHO KNEW INFINITY), Hopkins and Goode deliver crafty and moving performances as two of the 20th century’s great minds, whose intellectual sparring demonstrates both men’s formidable strengths and emotional vulnerabilities. –Todd Hitchcock