Not Your Regular Freud.

Director: Marvin Kren Cast: Robert Finster, Ella Rumpf, Georg Friedrich, Stefan Konarske

Everyone’s picture of Sigmund Freud is the old, white-bearded man, known to be the Father of psychoanalysis. A prolific writer of books, research papers and theories, he still holds an important place in the field of psychological studies. Often quoted as the writer of Interpretation of Dreams, we see him as young doctor, still experimenting his ways into hypnosis, in the Netflix series Freud. Here, the doctor isn’t the influential thinker we know him to be.

The backdrop is of the 1886 Vienna, a place where Freud spent most of his life. Much referred to be the scary and strange times, this ‘historical’ fiction thriller takes us back to the initial days of the doctor’s career—he is still working upon his presentations of hypnosis, and analyzing the function of the brain. There is another plotline that later takes the center stage— of the murder of a young lady, perhaps of significance. The series has elements of classic European noir, the dark-grey ambience, infested with crime, corpses and dungeons—dealing with the demons in the outer world and within. Marvin Kren, the director, portrays Freud as the German/Austrian Sherlock Holmes, however a genius with insightful details into the human mind, violence and sexuality, applying his distorted theories to solve crime. With bloody-nude bodies, torture ridden dungeons, seizures, cannibalistic opera singer, and drug ridden scenes, Freud has nothing to offer to a sophisticated Netflix watcher—it works sans the concept of imaginative barriers.

The eight-part series promises a out-of-his-senses, coked-up Sigmund Freud, referring to it as his process to think. He is seen practicing hypnosis to cure mental illnesses, however anxious to point his theories to the school of academicians and to his fiancé and family. It reminds you of the gothic horror.

A fictional work on a well-documented historic character is a tricky task, what is the real to fiction ratio? Working on this hypnosis theories, things take a weird turn when a dying prostitute lands on his front desk. Inspector Kiss and Poschacher suspect their former superior George von Lichtenberg—partly because they know his sadistic traits. Freud teams up with the policemen to catch the bad guys—but is it real or all in their heads? The show is embedded with supernatural occurrences. He later finds Fleur Salome (loosely based on Lou-Andreas Salome, Freud’s student and a friend in real life), who lives under the mental physical control of her adoptive mother Sophia von Szápáry. Countess Sophia manipulates Fleur’s powers to gain social and political power. Her mental abuse leads to Fleur’s eventual mental breakdown. Unlike Lou-Andreas Salome who was a psychoanalyst, Fleur is portrayed as a psychic and helps Freud to solve the series of crimes that have fallen upon the city. She has her own grotesque visions to deal with, and asks Freud for help. The series of events are intertwined with disappearance of a young girl and Countess Sophia’s involvement—she has the power to play mind games and combinations of psychosexual thoughts and ideas, drifting between surreal and the real.

Apart from solving murder mysterious, Freud is working on curing people of hysteria, the working of the brain, hallucinations and the demons that haunt the city. The events in the initial two episodes fall in line, the third episode onwards. It is a journey though grim events, hypnosis and horrors. The color schemes are dark, grey with overpowering red, orange and yellow. The cinematography is slow and steady, taking time to reveal the suspense. With many low angles and third-person perspective, the series builds onto the events, to be unfolded later.

In case you like watching twisted, grim, supernatural/psychological murder mysteries, Freud on Netflix is your show.