Bad Therapy

Bad Therapy

Bad Therapy is dark comedy about a married couple who are hunted by a disturbed psychologist. So many of its components were promising, hence it’s disappointing that it never really figures out how to mold them into a satisfactory shape.

It was directed by William Teitler and adapted by Nancy Doyne from her own novel of the same name. It’s a star studded indie movie with no coherent genres either in terms of tone, theme, world view or anything at all. A scene depicting this sort of cordial low stakes discord between spouses on one of the less than great shows on Netflix is followed by slapstick comedy; then there is sexual menace; more slapstick comedy; sudden unexpected violence and back to Netflix badness of marriage you get the picture.

Alicia Silverstone plays Susan Howard; Robert Corddry plays Bob Howard; their daughter from an earlier marriage is Louise (Anna Pniowsky). They live in a cute bungalow somewhere in Los Angeles as Nature Channel producer Bob shares his wife with her estate agent job. When Roxy (played by Aisha Tyler), Susan’s best friend announces she is carrying triplets, this sets off unresolved tensions regarding Susan and Bob’s relationship which eventually leads them to seek help from Judy Small whom Roxy also consulted.

However, Judy Small(Michaela Watkins) turns out to be the therapist who screws off Howards’ skulls tops and digs into their sub-conscious minds searching for buttons to press on. She convinces Bob and Susan to separately join her sessions but not together as couples with marriage issues. She feeds their minds with imaginations filled with doubt lies and cues that activates their destructive selves and also fosters suspicion towards each other.

Why is Judy so dangerous? Well she has her motives. Eventually though, after taking its own sweet time getting there, Bad Therapy looks at why she does what she does if only briefly before it moves on. And once that’s revealed, the character becomes less fascinating than when she was an enigmatic force of chaos because this movie doesn’t really care about having plausible psychology and it shouldn’t; there are many films out there like that, yet they still manage to intrigue, excite and surprise. But this is not one of them. “Bad Therapy” just manages to be realistic enough in its portrayal of the characters to make the scenes with psychological manipulation or sexuality and violence seem forced, superficially imposed rather than disturbing or even diverting.

This film has such good actors, you will forget for a short time. There just isn’t enough inherent magnetism within Corddry to buy into the idea that Bob would be irresistible to beautiful women; however, he does vulnerability well under duress and makes an attentive and intelligent partner for Silverstone who even makes mundane expositional lines fun through her off-the-cuff vocalizations. The script gives Watkins more than the film leaves her with; but it lets us know early on that Judy is completely nuts so I can hardly understand why two normally functioning smart adults would keep seeing her.

The other actors in this cast were much better than their roles allowed them to be.

Bob and Annabelle are coworkers. The boss has a thing for Bob and persuades him to get divorced although she is far more captivating when she is seen leaving Bob, walking away from the camera with her back turned, a small figure in distant focus than most actresses who might want to be shown in closeup. Nevertheless, she appears only briefly for the rest of the film.

David Paymer is so great that he can depict an entire character’s life within a few shots of him taking a walk along the street; his lengthy but tense scene sets his formidability before he disappears for no apparent reason in this film. John Ross Bowie, Haley Joel Osment, Flula Borg and other strong secondary actors are also wasted in this way; at least however they bring life to the screen for around two minutes each.

The movie “Bad Therapy” reminds fans of 80s and 90s cinema about some kind of thriller (like “Fatal Attraction”, “The Hand That Rocks The Cradle”, “Unlawful Entry”, or Cape Fear by Martin Scorsese) where stalkers acted as repressed desires or unexpressed neurosis which haunted these outwardly happy bourgeois couples. Nevertheless it does not have that lean sharpness found in the best movies from this sub-genre and many farcical comedy scenes (as works amazingly well as they did on What About Bob? And Captain Ron: light-hearted descendants of suburban stalker thrillers) make any tension caused by its narration disappear completely.

In fact, even Robert Altman (“The Player,” “Nashville”) would have had difficulty pulling together such diverse elements during his best work. Here we do not see any Altmans at all. Is this not strange given how similar its title is to one of Altman’s worst films Beyond Therapy? One would think that they may have gotten at least one wannabe.

This picture doesn’t seem to have any idea why it is doing what it does from one scene to another. Imagine standing still as someone throws random objects at you from a box, not knowing what will come next, be it a marshmallow or an old sock or even a piece of gravel.

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