The Patient

A therapist is held captive by a patient who wants help controlling his violent impulses. The Patient gives Steve Carell and Domhnall Gleeson a confined setting in which even an ordinary therapeutic question carries a different risk.

Carell makes the effort to remain professional feel inseparable from the effort to survive. Gleeson's performance keeps the balance unstable: the wish to be understood does not remove the danger he represents. The conversations have practical consequences that neither participant can simply leave at the office.

The restricted setting is the point, so this will appeal more to viewers interested in a tense exchange than in an expanding investigation. It asks what the methods of therapy can achieve when the conditions that make therapy possible have been removed. The short episodes suit the uncomfortable intimacy of that situation.