Series Review: "Freud" (2020).

From Netflix and Germany comes Freud. This Austrian-German crime series created by Marvin Kren, Stefan Brunner, and Benjamin Hessler. Eager to make his name in 19th-century Vienna, a hungry young Sigmund Freud joins a psychic and an inspector to solve a string of bloody mysteries.

By early January 2019, Robert Finster, Ella Rumpf, Georg Friedrich, Brigitte Kren, Christoph Krutzler, Anja Kling, Philipp Hochmair, Rainer Bock, Merab Ninidze, Stefan Konarske, and Johannes Krisch were cast in a new Austrian-German crime series re-imagining the life of a young Sigmund Freud with Kren, Brunner and Hessler as showrunners. At the same time, principal photography commenced and wrapped in late May. Filming took place in Prague, Czech Republic. Vienna-based psychoanalyst and hypnotherapist Juan José Rios consulted the production.

The series stars Finster, Rumpf, Friedrich, Kren, Krutzler, Kling, Hochmair, Bock, Ninidze, Konarske, and Krisch. Despite the strong atmospheric clichés the filmmakers could conjure (lanterns, fog, sewers), there isn't much suspense because you don't care much for the characters.

There's no reason to see the show. It's an unoriginal plot that you've seen a hundred times before. The performances are lackluster and the direction is uninspired. The show, however, is very serious, and the dissonance between its dramatic intentions, its events and its execution generates something of a mess. Audiences new to Sigmund Freud will comes away from this trite thriller with little understanding of the man himself, the times he lived him, or his hugely influential work. A bizarre mishmash of historical elements and subpar on-screen drama capped off with an underwhelming but serviceable performance from Finster. It's silly, has plot holes big enough to drive a truck through and is little more than a gothic version of Law & Order, yet it has a macabre charm that will keep you interested for the film's duration. But on the whole, the show never finds solid footing, and although the early murders are inventively intriguing, as the film goes on they slowly but surely lose their power to startle, amaze and perplex. An infuriating mix of amateurish writing and flowery antique speech; of sublime romance and hopeless pedantry; of atmospheric melancholy and risible smugness. The movie doesn't get at, not even nearly, how Freud's dilemma is complicated by the vexing pleasures of crass entertainments. Likely to disappoint both literary aficionados and action-thriller fans, the film neither captures the creepy atmospheres of Freud's influential works on its own. They want it to be Seven meets Sherlock Holmes and you can tell Finster is into it. Unfortunately the plot is ridiculous and the murder-mystery is boring. It lingers intolerably on some inessential scenes, rushes through others, and fails to provide any motivation either for Freud (albeit a fictional version) or the film's archvillain. Ridiculous and tedious, this somber historical fantasy tries to transform Freud into an Austrian version of Sherlock Holmes. Freud, serial-killer hunter. That's the lamebrain concept of the eerie writer's mysterious final days in Vienna as posited in this misdirected effort.

Simon says Freud receives: