Official synopsis
Keane (John Magaro), struggling with writer’s block, watches his marriage to Suzie (Britt Lower) fall apart. After she announces she wants a divorce, a bizarre man claiming to be Keane’s biggest fan – and a retired serial killer – (Steve Buscemi as Kollmick) enters their lives. When a misunderstanding leads Suzie to think the stranger is a marriage counselor hired by her husband, Keane sees an opportunity. He agrees to write a book about the killer . . . just as long as he plays along as their new counselor.
Review
Writer/director Tolga Karaçelik’s U.S./Turkey coproduction Psycho Therapy: The Shallow Tale of a Writer Who Decided to Write about a Serial Killer is an interesting beast. It’s amusing throughout, and certainly entertaining. The humor never quite reached laugh-out-loud levels for me, though, and the thriller aspects didn’t have a strong sense of urgency.
Despite those feelings, I was interested throughout, thanks in large part to the lead performances of Buscemi, Lower, and Magaro, and the situations in which their characters find themselves. Kollmick’s role playing as a marriage counselor is as unusual as the initially icy Suzie’s intrigued reception of it, and her later suspicions and sleuthing regarding what deadly matters her nebbish husband might be up to make her character increasingly more interesting.
Psycho Therapy: The Shallow Tale of a Writer Who Decided to Write about a Serial Killer leans into tropes such as the novelist who can’t finish their second book, the married couple on the verge of divorce who reconsider when an unusual stranger enters their lives, and so on. Still, there are enough engaging elements at play here to recommend this film for devotees of genre-film comedy.
Psycho Therapy: The Shallow Tale of a Writer Who Decided to Write about a Serial Killer is available on UK digital download from 15th September, 2025.
