Adventures in German TV: Solving Crimes with Daddy Freud
You know him. You read him in college. Maybe you pay someone every week to listen to your problems because of him. When you hear his name, you probably associate it with the famous black-and-white portrait with the cigar and the white beard and the stern look. But what if — just what if! — Sigmund Freud was young, hot, and weirdly horny?
Enter Freud, Netflix’s eight-episode answer to this question that debuted in March 2020 with Robert Finster in the titular role. It’s not the first show to hinge on the conceit of imagine if this famous historical figure representative of an academic or antiquated institution had sex and behaved like a human, and it won’t be the last. There’s also Dickinson, a rare win for Apple TV in which Hailee Steinfeld plays the Amherst poetess and Wiz Khalifa plays Death. There’s the breathy romance of Victoria, a show less concerned with the business of running the world’s largest empire than with the drool-worthy chemistry between leads Jenna Coleman and Tom Hughes. HBO handled a mature Catherine the Great with gravitas, gold lighting, and Helen Mirren; Hulu took on the flower of her youth with irreverence, dick jokes, and Elle Fanning. And then there’s The Crown because there is always The Crown, which made everyone born after 1980 suddenly aware that Queen Elizabeth was not hatched at 65 and that at least some members of that godforsaken family have an inkling of personality, however repugnant that inkling may be. In every case, the shows are highly stylized, very dramatic, and cast with actors significantly better looking than their real life counterparts, thank God.
Freud is one of these shows. But Freud is also so, so much more than that.
In other words, what Freud is trying to be is everything. It’s an occult murder mystery with enough ominous totems made from twigs that it imagines itself as the 19th century offshoot season of True Detective. It’s a horror show with the pulp, camp, low lighting, and high-budget cheap thrills of American Horror Story, although it lacks some of the flash-bang shamelessness Ryan Murphy first mastered with Glee, or possibly even earlier with Nip/Tuck. It’s the kind of medical(-adjacent) drama that draws dramatic tension not from who’s boning McDreamy but from how everyone spent the advent of modern medicine and/or psychoanalysis absolutely winging it (see also: The Knick). It lacks the precision and people-eating of Hannibal but shares its penchant for the surreal and for vaguely clairvoyant detective work. Did I mention it’s also a superhero origin story?
When we first meet him, hot, young, no-name Sigmund Freud is not doing so well. His methods are scoffed at by his peers and his superiors. He’s so bad at hypnosis that he enlists his housekeeper to fake being in trance for a demonstration. (It goes poorly.) He’s swigging cocaine — who knew you could drink it? — and months behind on rent. His girlfriend’s parents are being total killjoys because his being a doctor doesn’t outweigh his sub-zero bank account. Meanwhile his only friend drags him to weird parties where he’s drafted into the tableau vivant as Tree #2, and he can’t even hold the branch right. Alas.
Not to worry! Superhero origin stories always begin with our hero as a down-on-his-luck nobody. As the show progresses, Freud grows stronger and smarter and becomes increasingly adept at hypnosis, which functions mostly as a magic mind control bullet. By the final episode and despite incurring some losses, Freud and his methods are vindicated. His enemies are vanquished by firing squad. The writers even take pains to assure us that this is just beginning. Gee whiz, I wonder what this Sigmund fellow will do next! Ugh.
Onto the bonkers murder mystery, which the show divides between two storylines. The first involves Inspector Alfred Kiss, a battered war veteran turned cop with a hell of a right hook when his PTSD isn’t psychosomatically crippling his hand. He resents authority in general but particularly hates the people above him (and his peers), which makes sense because they are sleazy Prussian blowhards and deranged murderous perverts. To their collective chagrin, Kiss is intent on solving the gruesome killings plaguing Vienna, sifting through occult symbols and strange melodies while realizing interviewing murderers is useless when they’re in a mind-control trance. (I don’t know… I just feel like this isn’t how hypnosis works?) All the while he’s trying to be a good father figure to his dead son’s kids, which is harder than it looks when assassins hired by the aforementioned blowhard-pervert contingent are breaking into your house to kill you.
The second storyline centers on Fleur Salomé, a medium prone to hysteric outbursts who accurately “sees” the crimes Kiss is investigating before and sometimes after they happen. She is minded by Viktor and Sofia von Szápáry, a pair of eccentric Hungarian revolutionaries scheming to use her supernatural gifts to free their homeland from Austria’s imperial grip. Fleur suffers from a split personality: her normal self, plus a deep-voiced Hungarian shaman-like figure called a táltos. She’s the main attraction of the Szápárys’ lavish parties and séances, hosted in hopes of landing an invitation to a royal ball with proper regicide proximity. To ensure the invitation, they’re more than happy to put Fleur in a trance state and send her off to the unhinged crown prince, who, upon her arrival, decides he would rather rape her than have his fortune told. In one of the most bizarre sexual sequences arguably ever seen on TV, she wanders from the palace to Freud’s apartment after the rape, mounts him as he cleans her wounds, wakes up the next morning in Freud’s bed and panics over how the prince raped her while she was in trance, has sex with Freud a second time, shifts into the táltos personality and tries (unsuccessfully this time) to initiate round three.
To be fair, it makes thematic sense that a show about Sigmund Freud has patently insane sexual politics, and that the sexual motivations of the female lead are unpredictable and frustratingly opaque. In 1926, Freud (the real person) famously referred to adult women’s sexuality as psychology’s “dark continent,” and throughout the sequence, Freud (the character) is woefully unprepared for Fleur’s outburst of domineering sexual energy and manic desire. She snaps not only between personalities but between states of domination and submission, from being raped to arguably raping Freud mere hours later, then to having intense and only semi-consensual sex with him the following morning. She whizzes between trauma and catharsis and back again. She shape-shifts between roles: object of male sexual desire and docile pawn of the Szápárys on the one hand, and wild-eyed dominator capable of driving men to do her will on the other. Her duality refutes Freud’s understanding of female sexual submissiveness; his sexual surrender to her is a definitive if troubling flex of female power, upending their doctor-patient relationship and drawing him deeper into the web of her psychosis.
And what a tangled and bloody web it is, because this is also a gory horror show. Danger (guys with knives, among other things) lurks in the dim corridors of this gothic version of 1800s Vienna, all smoky subterranean taverns and pitch black tunnels. The cinematography is superb, particularly when representing the subconscious. Stairwells viewed from above descend into darkness. There’s a chase sequence through a hedge maze — Psych horror bingo! — and the wintery bareness of its branches resembles spindly claws in the moonlight. The brightness of the hospital interiors, where all this subconscious sediment is supposedly being sifted and cataloged, is sterile and uncomfortable. Shadowy figures blur into specters in the shallow depth of field. To that end, the sound design is equally good and equally dependent on horror genre tactics. Street noise and footsteps echo ominously. Sustained, discordant high notes accompany Fleur’s most terrifying visions. A piano tinkles out a tinny melody from behind a locked door. When Freud enters the room to investigate, no one is inside. (Gasp!)
It’s a lot. In fact, let’s recap: Freud is a pulp-fantasy-surreal-horror-murder-mystery series somewhere between reimagined biopic and superhero origin story. It contains political intrigue and police corruption subplots, all the while emphasizing a number of trademark early psychoanalytic concepts. It features bonkers dream sequences in which Freud imagines himself literally killing his father and penetrating his mother, violent childhood flashbacks, drug mania, knife fights, shabbat dinners with the family, banter with the housekeeper, and squabbles over borrowed money with the brother-in-law. Eight episodes simply isn’t enough, especially when it takes three or so full episodes to get the plot moving properly. Freud doesn’t have a single episode with even remotely focused writing, and the whole show suffers for it.
But Freud does try. It tries to be everything, which is arguably more respectable than a show that doesn’t try at all, and the technical aspects — not just the sound design and cinematography but also the lighting, costuming, and production design— put its big budget to decent use. Unfortunately the end result is a little absurd and very messy and fails to answer any of its own questions, albeit with the exception of “What if Sigmund Freud was young and hot and horny and solved crimes?”
But it’s true what they say: there are no stupid questions. There are only stupid TV shows.
Is this a series now? Should I just get a Substack? What is even going on? Whatever. To read the first Adventures in German TV entry on Amazon Prime’s Wir Kinder Vom Bahnhof Zoo remake, click here.
