A meeting between Freud and CS Lewis should crackle with energy - but in Matthew Brown's film it merely fizzlesAs the spectre of a second world war looms, Sigmund Freud and CS Lewis meet to debate the existence of God. That should make for a heavyweight tussle: two great minds doing battle, for the highest imaginable stakes, across the course of a single day.
In the final act, Hopkins stirs from his stupor. Through bitter laughter, Freud cries over his grandson’s death, and, for just an instant, the writing sharpens too, enough to draw blood. “What a wonderful plan, for God,” he says, voice choked with irony, “to kill a little boy.” That moment of artistic revelation is followed, not long after, by Goode’s fine fragment of speech about his maker: “My idea of God, it constantly changes: he shatters it, again and again.