Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Freud’ On Netflix, A German Thriller Where A Young, Coked-Up Sigmund Freud Hunts Down A Killer

Don’t expect the new German/Austrian series Freud to be a biography of the great Sigmund Freud. No, this series makes him more into a Viennese Sherlock Holmes, with many of the fictional detective’s vices and proclivities. Can the show help viewers let go of what they know about Freud and just enjoy this fictional version of him?

FREUD: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A voice goes “You hear my voice and you see the pendulum.” Then we see a closeup of a pocket watch being swung back and forth.

The Gist: A young Sigmund Freud (Robert Finster) is hypnotizing a woman that hasn’t spoken in 30 years, since her daughter was killed in an accident. He manages to bring her back to that day and get her to scream — which is when we find out that he’s rehearsing a presentation where he’ll pretend to put his housekeeper Lenore (Brigitte Kren) under. He needs for this rehearsed session to go well; the struggling neurologist is going to present his studies on hypnosis to 30 of Vienna’s most prominent doctors in hopes to get a grant. But, since putting people under is difficult, he decides to fake it until he makes it.

Freud has been struggling to establish himself in the medical community, and he’s behind on his rent. He doesn’t really sleep or eat, and he guzzles a cocaine solution whenever he gets the chance. This is how he furiously prepares to make his presentation.

He’s interrupted by Detectives Alfred Kiss (Georg Friedrich) and Franz Poschacher (Christoph F. Krutzler), who were at a crime scene in a boarding house, looking at the bloody body of a young woman, who suddenly started breathing again. Since Freud is the closest doctor, they bring her to his apartment, but she dies. Soon after, his friend takes him to a high-society midnight party that’s actually a seance. The medium, Fleur Salomé (Ella Rumpf), who does these demonstrations with her mother, has already chosen her mark, but when she actually does “channel” the mark’s dead husband, she actually has an dream that she’s following the woman’s daughter out of the room. When she wakes, she’s in the middle of a seizure.

Feud is fascinated at how she got to that state, and theorizes that physical touch works better than a pendulum when it comes to hypnotizing subjects. That comes to fruition during the presentation the next day; he holds Lenore’s hands during the demonstration and he finds out later that he implanted a false memory into her head while she was under. He gets laughed out of the room by the esteemed doctors on the panel, but he knows he’s onto something.

His friend somehow gets him to another high-society bacchanalia, where he encounters Fleur and her mother again. When he sees Fleur by herself, he uses touch to hypnotize her into going further into what she saw the previous night. What it leads to shocks him.

Our Take: It’s pretty easy to say that Freud isn’t a biographical series of the great psychiatrist Sigmund Freud. Here, director Marvin Kren —along with his co-writers Stefan Brunner and Benjamin Hessler— imagines Freud as a Viennese Sherlock Holmes, obsessed with his work, dependent on the late 19th century’s finest narcotics, and horny as all get out. It’s not a bad basis for a character, and it feels that the series will do a good job of making Freud into a sleuth. It just feels like episode 1 takes some time to get there.

There’s a ton of exposition in the first episode, because it basically has to reset where Freud is at this point in his life, which is struggling to get his theories on psychoanalysis accepted by a medical community that thinks psychiatry is more about physical brain health than mental health. Even when he introduces the idea of the unconscious to the panel of doctors, they all scoff. He’s missing the love of his life, who writes him love letters that say that her parents don’t want her to marry him, and he can’t help but get embroiled in the unseemly side of Vienna’s aristocracy.

But what this story will be is a murder mystery, mixed with Freud’s work with Fleur and the world of dreams and nightmares. It promises to be an interesting series full of twists and turns, but the first episode takes its time to set things up before really getting into the action.

Sex and Skin: At the second party Freud goes to, he holds a palm frond while an artist paints a scene full of naked men and women. Also, in Fleur’s vision, she sees a naked man covered in blood.

Parting Shot: Freud goes to the tunnel where Fleur says she saw the little girl go to, but then thinks better of it and turns back.

Sleeper Star: Ella Rumpf has to do a lot of physical heavy lifting as Fleur, acting like she’s under hypnosis and having seizures. She does a decent job of making this behavior seem as natural as possible, given the circumstances.

Most Pilot-y Line: The army soldier Kiss thinks killed the young woman tries to take solace by giving his fellow soldier a blowjob. Is that going somewhere storywise, or was that just a gratuitous tribute to Freud’s theories on sex?

Our Call: STREAM IT. The first episode of Freud is a bit confusing, but if you put the real Sigmund Freud out of your mind, you should be able to buckle in and enjoy the ride on this psychological thriller.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

Stream Freud On Netflix