The Patient
2022
Original language: English
- drama
- crime
The story
A psychotherapist finds himself held prisoner by a serial killer with an unusual request: curb his homicidal urges.
What it’s like
Cool, grey-blue interiors dominate this limited series, with dim basement light, sterile clinic corridors, and long, patient two-shots that let faces hold the frame. Its pacing is deliberate and claustrophobic, built on extended therapy-room conversations that tighten into tense, quietly unsettling stretches, and the score stays sparse and low, rarely more than a pulse under the dialogue. Steve Carell and Domhnall Gleeson play off each other with restrained, wary intensity, and the emotional register is serious and watchful, more about manipulation, guilt and the fragile terms of trust than about spectacle. Violence is present and sometimes abrupt, with some on-screen killing and threat, but it is mostly implied or brief rather than gory, and the dread comes from the uneasy power shifts between the two men. Best suited to late-night viewing alone by viewers who want a tense, character-driven thriller with a psychological edge, not something gentle or comforting.
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