An old adage holds that every therapist needs a therapist. Even during the infancy of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud insisted that all analysts should submit themselves to analysis. Recent cinema has seized on this painfully unbreakable cycle. In Mary Bronstein's hallucinatory film If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Rose Byrne plays Linda, a therapist and floundering mother caught in a downward spiral. Similarly, in the 2022 horror Smile, psychiatrist Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) is pursued by a malignant metaphor for her own poor mental health. These films illustrate that therapists are as much at the mercy of their traumas as anyone else.
Therapists Take Center Stage
Rather than being relegated to supporting character status—as they long have been in everything from Good Will Hunting (1997) to The Sopranos—film is finally giving therapists their moment on the couch. Within a single month in UK cinemas, two more psychological professionals are taking on lead roles. Backrooms sees Renate Reinsve portray a secure, calm psychiatrist and self-help author who lives alone and subsists on lacklustre ready meals, only to unravel into a nervous wreck navigating the uncanny corridors of her own mind. Meanwhile, in Rebecca Zlotowski's A Private Life, a Francophone Jodie Foster plays a therapist turned sleuth, investigating the death of a former client while failing to address her own shortcomings as a spouse and parent.
Cultural Shift Behind the Trend
The trigger behind this new onscreen parade of ailing therapist protagonists is in some ways obvious: more people are having therapy than ever before. A 2026 survey found that 37% of adults in the UK were seeking therapy services, a 2% increase from the previous year. Despite being stigmatised only a few years ago, therapy is now branded as sexy. The rise of the therapy influencer, or TherapyTok, has allowed professionals and their jargon to transgress the boundaries of the therapist's room into mainstream culture. Multiple podcasts have been dedicated to the topic, from pop-psychotherapist Esther Perel's Where Should We Begin? to the true-crime slash therapy podcast The Shrink Next Door, which may have inspired Zlotowski. Reality television has also gleefully broken with client confidentiality, with shows like Couples Therapy pushing the practice to the epicentre of collective consciousness.
From Villainous to Flawed
Even so-called therapy-speak has transferred into cinema. Critic Billie Walker points out dubious use of the lingo in psychiatric spinoffs of franchises, such as the Nicolas Cage vampire flick Renfield (2023), where the titular sidekick realises he has an unhealthily co-dependent relationship with Dracula. Beyond gimmicky character diagnoses, the cinematic reputation of therapists has been steadily deteriorating for years. In Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island (2010), an asylum's menacing staffers may or may not be conspiring against detective Teddy (Leonardo DiCaprio). Guillermo del Toro's Nightmare Alley (2021) depicted Dr. Lilith Ritter (Cate Blanchett), a therapist from hell who extorts her rich clientele and tapes sessions for blackmail. In Beau Is Afraid (2023), a fragile man-child's therapist reveals herself to be one of his nemeses.
Perhaps this trope of the villainous therapist has graduated to a more rounded, reasonable portrayal. Filmmakers have recognised that therapists are not, as Bronstein notes, perfect or impossibly self-sacrificing like Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting, but flawed human beings—their career choice of holistic adviser making them all the more interesting. In If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Linda is at the end of her tether caring for her daughter, unable to attend to her own needs let alone those of her patients. Her own analyst (and boss), a vexed Conan O'Brien, has his own life and defects, creating an infinite chain of frustrated therapists.
Horror as a Mirror for Anxiety
What this new league of erring onscreen therapists have in common is that they exist in the realm of horror. The supernatural worlds these filmmakers create are designed to mirror the spiralling negative thought patterns of their main characters. Whether a labyrinth of augmented memory in Backrooms, a magical asbestos-filled hole in the ceiling in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, a trauma-hungry demon in Smile, or a sinister hypnosis trip in A Private Life, the otherworldly elements enhance an atmosphere of claustrophobia, panic, and dread. Though there have been rare comedy equivalents, such as the series Shrinking, in general these fictional shrinks live in a landscape of terror.
More so than the villainous therapist trope—which suggests our shrinks are out to get us—these newfangled therapists tap into a much greater fear. Since all people are faulty in unique ways and weighed down by personal baggage, how equipped can any one therapist be to properly deal with another person's issues? It is telling that in each of these releases, the real sense of dread sets in when a previously self-possessed therapist loses their cool. While scepticism endures around therapy as an infallible cure to our problems, it is unsurprising that we are seeing such bewildering anxieties projected on to the screen.
