The Patient review: Greg and Zanna's verdict on Steve Carell's new psychological thriller

The Patient. Photo / Supplied

Greg and Zanna watch a movie about fear of therapy.

SCORES
Scariness of psychopath: 5
Quality of takeaways: 5

SHE SAW

There's a very good chance I will end up as someone's patient if I continue to watch The Patient. I don't have the right constitution for these types of shows - psychological thrillers. I lay awake most of the night after we'd watched it, not exclusively replaying the serial killer's creepy facial expressions in my head, but also not not doing that. Greg loved it. He said it was like Misery but better because "Misery is the most boring movie ever made." That seems unlikely but he does love to speak in hyperbole, especially when he's excited about something, as he was about this show.

The only reason I agreed to watch it is because it stars Steve Carell and I wrongly assumed nothing with the 40-year-old virgin in it could be that creepy. I was relying on his wholesome face to carry me through the "thrilling" moments. Carell plays a recently widowed psychologist who is kidnapped by one of his patients, chained to the floor in his basement and ordered to fix his captor, who turns out to be a serial killer who wants to stop killing. It's a bit like Barry in that sense but a much darker, more real, exploration into the mind of someone who is compelled to kill, even sometimes against their own will.

The episodes are short, only about 20 minutes but each finishes with a robust cliffhanger that makes the series feel very slick. It's created by Joel Fields and Joseph Weisberg, who were behind the excellent series The Americans, about Russian spies in the US. They're clearly a very capable storytelling team and although we're only part way through, I can tell there's no fat in this series, the tension is steadily rising and it's going to come, I'm sure, to a very exciting climax and will ultimately be a tightly packaged 10-episode series.

If anything, it feels a bit too neat to me, verging on gimmicky. The series takes place entirely inside the basement of the serial killer's house and rests wholly on this very "clever" premise about a chronic murderer attempting to fast-track his recovery from violent behaviours through violence. It certainly appears that there's no way that Carell's character can get out of there alive unless he becomes a murderer himself, meaning the outcome is the opposite of what the patient intended - instead of his becoming more like his therapist, his therapist becomes more like him. I hope that's not a spoiler. I don't know the trajectory of the show and, because I need to be able to sleep properly, I never will.

HE SAW

Just as I sat down to write this review, a colleague started telling me about the movie Ticket to Paradise, starring George Clooney and Julia Roberts, which she'd watched the night before. She described it as "candy floss", "inconsequential" and "fluffy" and said she knew she would never think about it again, but said she enjoyed it nevertheless, calling it: "The perfect antidote to the horrors of the modern world."

I'd spent the previous night watching the first three episodes of a new psychological thriller featuring kidnap, murder and a lot of scary music. In appearance, it was decidedly not the perfect antidote to the modern world. In its terror and ability to manufacture anxiety, it was, if anything, a precise replica of the modern world. Still, there was something antidotal about that too. Yes, the world is burning while David Seymour obsesses over public holidays but at least we're not chained to a bed being forced to provide therapy to a serial killer who wants us to talk him out of killing even as he makes us s*** in a pot.

Fear is the narrative driver of The Patient. The fear is what keeps us watching: What's going to happen to Carell and to the serial killer and to the possible population of people who will be killed by the serial killer should Carell fail to talk sense into the killer? The tension is high, and is only occasionally leavened by the killer's expressions of love for - and articulacy regarding - high-end takeaway dinners.

What The Patient does is to reassign our fear, so it's no longer about the future of humanity, but about the future of Steve Carell. And, while I didn't want Carell to die a horrible death at the hands of a psychopath, I at least knew that this particular psychopath wouldn't soon be seeking re-election as president of the United States. As a result, I went to bed temporarily cleansed of my fear about looming catastrophe, or at least more sanguine about it, and while that's not great news for the planet, we should never forget that the planet exists, at least in part, to serve us an enormous amount of streaming content. And that's important because it means we never need to fear having so little to watch that our best available alternative will be Ticket to Paradise.

The Patient is now streaming on Apple TV+.