We reckon Steve Carell would be a great therapist: he’s got experience empathising with a lot of complex characters, a book about the making of The Office called him “the loveliest man in Hollywood”, and he could make you laugh while you’re sobbing about your trauma.
But can he tackle a truly disturbed patient like Domnhall Gleeson? The British actor will soon play a serial killer seeking help for the first time, who believes that Carell can fix his messed-up urges. With the help of a chain around the therapist’s ankle. The Patient streams on Disney+ from August 30, and comes from the creators of highly-acclaimed Soviet drama The Americans.
In the trailer below, we get a lot of match-cuts between the doc and his latest client, lying in bed alone grappling with their own respective mental wounds. Carell is grief-stricken after the loss of his wife, and Gleeson is reaching a breaking point after some shadowy, off-screen kills.
Trying to stay calm in Gleeson’s homemade prison, Carell tries to explain why the dangerous young man’s plan won’t work. “Successful therapy requires a safe environment without anything like fear hanging over every session”, he says in an unsteady voice. Luckily for us, fear is a great narrative device for limited thriller series like this.
We might be getting a Silence of the Lambs situation, where the doctor must submit intimate details about his own life in order to get through to his damaged patient. All we hope is that Carell makes it out alive, as it seems in the clips above that Gleeson doesn’t show much signs of progress. Only escalation, as he drags cloth-wrapped bodies along an alleyway floor.
You’ll have to be a bit patient to watch The Patient on Disney+, with the ten-episode series being released soon on Disney+. Carell also acts as a producer on the show, giving us faith that he might have vouched for a dark joke or two to be included in the script.
