One of the great benefits of the whole 1990s revival thing has been a run of movies inspired by the early Coens. Psycho Therapy does a bit of a number on Barton Fink, not the Coens’ funniest or weirdest film, and is a re-assessment of their re-assessment of Hollywood output in its golden age. Screwball and crime, for the most part.
It’s an “only in Hollywood” caper, about a stalled writer whose latest book set in Slovenia in the Neanderthal era is never going to be world shaking, if it ever gets finished at all. Keane’s friends laugh at him, wife Suzie pities him and his agent won’t answer his calls. Then one day in a diner he’s approached by a guy called Kollmick, a big fan, Kollmick says, who offers him a ready-made. The story of Kollmick himself, a pitiless serial killer – ex-serial killer, he corrects. The Shallow Tale of a Writer Who Decided to Write about a Serial Killer is the film’s subtitle, so Keane obviously takes Kollmick up on his offer.
This is Turkish writer/director Tolga Karaçelik’s first film in English but he’s not finished there. In one more twist that is very Coens, and a touch Woody Allen, Keane winds up passing off his new writing buddy to his wife not as his new writing buddy (degrading), or as an ex-serial killer (scary), but as a relationship therapist (since she’s on the verge of leaving him, this makes some sort of sense).
And off it kicks, a farcical tale of mistaken identity, wilful cover-up, people at cross purposes, starting at quirk and eventually arriving at full-bore screwball.
Screwball needs good actors who can be both deadpan and yet rattle the lines off convincingly. This has them in the shape of Steve Buscemi as Kollmick. A star of Barton Fink and Miller’s Crossing, let’s not forget, Buscemi wrings big laughs with deadpan delivery, especially in the scenes where Kollmick attempts couples therapy on Keane and Suzie, hiding his ignorance behind a cosplay of a therapist’s professional disengagement and walking a line between the plausible and the preposterous. John Magaro plays the hopeless author, proving he’s the chameleon actor who can do comedy as well as all the other things. Britt Lower, who shot this between season one and two of Severance – striking while the iron is hot – again demonstrates the power of the unreadable face. What is Suzie thinking, especially once she starts to suspect that – more Coens – Keane is trying to poison her?
In a development that will gladden the manosphere, Suzie might in fact be turned on by the thought that her husband is trying to kill her because the big problem in their marriage has been his lack of gumption. Suzie wears the trousers in their household and she’s a bit sick of it. If only her husband would take charge.
Good screwball also has great character actors in the small roles. Sydney Cole Alexander as Suzie’s useful confidant and Lee Sellars as an art-obsessed supplier of guns both hit the spot.
A word about the score – often wordless chanting with a flute parping away somewhere in the mix. It’s a world away from what you’d expect, but it somehow works.
All in all this is a reminder of the sort of film that Buscemi used to turn up in a few decades ago. He still has it, he really does. But then so do Lower and Magaro. And it effectively captures the spirit of old school Hollywood entertainment as transmitted through the mediumship of the Coens – it’s fun, fast, clever and very entertaining.
Psycho Therapy – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
