Therapists on 4 Unexpectedly Therapeutic Films

As therapists, we’re primed to experience films as windows into the different ways people protect themselves, express love, and find meaning and purpose in the face of change and loss. We asked four prominent therapists to tell us about a film—new or old—that’s stayed with them.

Let’s start with the good stuff. Hacks is a brilliant show: superbly acted and written. Although the characters are people you like and dislike in equal measure, you always find yourself rooting for them. It features glossy, escapist lifestyles and a balance of dark and light comedy. It takes on cross-generational friendship and mentorship, and centers a woman over 60—Deborah Vance (played by Jean Smart).

Still, the characters aren’t always easy to embrace. Deborah, who’s had phenomenal success despite the hostility she’s faced in the entertainment world, is a comedian and businessperson chasing the grail of a late-night talk show. Her counterpoint and head writer Ava Daniels (played by Hannah Einbinder) is a prototypical dysregulated millennial who’s made some bad choices and gets a last chance at professional redemption writing material for Deborah. They’re surrounded by a coterie of agents, managers, assistants, domestic employees, casino workers, and entertainment-world hangers-on, who benefit from Deborah’s generosity, enable her, deal blackjack in her home, endure her abuse, love her, make the impossible happen, and are caught in a toxic cycle of keeping her life as frictionless as possible.

The show opens with Deborah antagonizing her audience in a Las Vegas stand-up comedy act. From there, we observe her behave in ways that are entitled, emotionally dysregulated, contemptuous, vain, and elitist. Ava matches that energy with entitled insouciance and generalized contempt for the world. She lives in a chronic state of “gotcha,” a scold correcting everyone around her from her progressive perch.

These two women treat each other horribly, trading verbal abuse, criticism, mockery, contempt, litigation, violence, and threats. They part ways. And then they come back together. And the cycle repeats. It’s workplace abuse intermingled with friendship abuse, threaded through with glimmers of mutual respect.

As entertaining and funny as they are, the appeal of these characters is their complexity. They carry wounds, grief, losses, and past traumas. We can contextualize their unhealthy behavior and empathize with it. At times, Deborah is cruel, even sadistic, only to reveal her vulnerable nature, charitable heart, and desire to get it right. We shift from liking her to fearing her to liking her again. Her money serves as emotional armor, and we’re reminded of how much contrition can be paid forward to others through investment capital. Yet that still doesn’t tell us who she is. She defies simple characterization as a villain, feminist, or trauma survivor.

But this is TV, not a mental health documentary. Over many episodes, we watch these characters get locked into a trauma-bonded relationship, fueled by boom-bust periods, apologies and abuse, financial largesse and withholding. In fact, we find ourselves rooting for an unhealthy relationship! And because this is TV, everything is beautifully buttoned up at the end of the series. That’s not life.

Watching Hacks left me wondering if TV and film can sometimes get us stuck in the perpetual hope that if we stick around long enough in a relationship filled with unhealthy dynamics, there will be a happy ending. I’ve been a therapist long enough to have witnessed clients die waiting for this. I’ve seen clients put their own happiness on a layaway plan, installing it into an imaginary future when a happy ending will come, or the relationship will calm down, or things will somehow resolve or come together. It rarely does, and in many abusive relationships, tormentors outlive the survivors.

The abusive dynamics in the series—physical, financial, and emotional—would be considered risk factors for escalation and worsening outcomes down the road in real-world therapy. In real life, we stay in these situations for a variety of reasons related to cognitive dissonance, attachment, traumatic re-enactment, practical tethers, and just plain hope. We stay even as things escalate and become increasingly unsafe, believing it will get better.

I think we watch shows like Hacks because the pairing of laughter and tension has a bittersweet, salty, toxic feel to it, and it reminds us why antagonistic relationships are so seductive and vexatious. The good, bad, abusive, pleasurable, and hopeful all swirl together.

At its core, because closure and happy endings are so rare when antagonistic cycles are at play, there’s something soothing about watching the elusive outcome we hope for unfold on TV. That’s the escape entertainment offers. In real life, the odds of things coming together as they do at the end of a show like Hacks is akin to a fantasy. But after a long day of working with clients through heartbreaking experiences of contentious divorces, long-term emotionally abusive marriages, harmful workplaces, and intergenerational trauma, it’s nice to laugh at a few fantastic jokes and see everything work out.

Difficult relationships are complex. We can vacillate between revulsion and connection with an antagonistic character on a show and recognize that it’s not as simple as writing them off as “bad.” Our clients struggle with this too, only their lives aren’t a show. Their struggles are real, and we must help them reckon with the challenges of attachment and self-abandonment within unsafe and unpredictable relationships.

In a TV series, happy endings occur when everything works out. In life, perhaps it’s just that we can help ourselves and our clients achieve clarity, even when the hopes we hold for our relationships never materialize.

The first time I showed The Butterfly Circus (Weigel, 2009) to a room of students, I did not warn them. I dimmed the lights, started the film, and watched their faces instead of the screen. It is a small movie, twenty minutes long, made years ago for a short-film competition, and it has no business landing the way it does. By the halfway point a few of them had stopped taking notes. At the end, one woman came to the front of the classroom to grab my tissue box, and a man in the back who rarely spoke in class held out his hand. The box made its way around the room. Nobody wanted to talk right away. When we finally did, we did not talk about the acting or the camera work. We talked about a client. Everyone in that room, it turned out, had someone, or some particular experience, in mind while they watched.

We kept coming back to the film all semester. It became our shorthand. When a theory felt flat and abstract on the page, someone would say, “like the Butterfly Circus,” and the idea would snap into focus. I have taught trauma for a long time, and I have never found a better way to make a theory feel true in the body before a student has to defend it on an exam. That is what I want to talk about here, because I think the film does something for seasoned clinicians too, something we quietly need and rarely admit to needing.

The story is simple. A young man named Will, born without arms or legs, is bought and put on display in a Depression-era sideshow, billed as a curiosity for people to gawk at. The man who owns him tells him, in a hundred small ways, that he is disgusting, worthless, and less than human, and after enough years Will believes it. Then a traveling troupe called the Butterfly Circus finds him. Its ringmaster, a man named Mendez, looks at Will and does not flinch. He treats him as a person. The rest of the film watches Will move from a creature people pity to a man with a place in the world.

I am not going to pretend Mendez is a therapist. He is not one, and reading him as one would miss the point. The film gives us something better than a technique to copy. It gives us a chance to feel, from a safe distance, the exact human process our theories are trying to describe.

Here is what I have come to believe after years of doing this work and years of watching new people learn it. Treating trauma is more than being a warm, supportive presence in the room. Warmth is where it starts, and warmth is a great deal of it, but warmth by itself is not treatment. Good trauma work asks for something harder. It asks for a clinician who has taken the theories of our profession and made them their own, so fully that they understand, in the moment, why they are saying what they are saying and doing what they are doing. The interventions we now call “empirically validated” did not fall out of the sky. They were built on the shoulders of theories and research about how people become broken and how people mend, and a clinician who has lost touch with those theories is following a recipe they cannot adjust when the person in front of them turns out not to be the person the recipe was written for. A film can do what a textbook cannot here. It can put the theory back into the body.

Watch Will and you are watching what Judith Herman described decades ago, when she gave us the language of complex trauma. She showed us that when a person is hurt again and again by someone they cannot escape, the harm does not stay on the surface. It gets inside. The cruelty of the person in charge becomes the survivor’s own opinion of themself. Will does not simply have a hard life. He has swallowed the sideshow owner’s contempt and made it the truth about who he is. That is the wound, and it lives in his beliefs long before anyone lays a hand on him again.

We see versions of Will every week. Some of our clients arrive with a chart that reads “complex PTSD”. Some carry a personality disorder diagnosis that other clinicians say with a sigh. Some have no diagnosis at all, only a life that has gone hard and a history of being hurt they can barely put into words. What John Bowlby taught us about attachment is sitting right there in all of them. Early in life, each of us builds a private map of whether other people can be trusted to be safe, and when the people who were supposed to protect us were the ones causing the harm, that map comes out cruel. Will flinches from kindness. He expects mockery. At one point he spits at Mendez, because contempt is the only response he has ever been able to predict. None of that is a character flaw. Each reaction is a prediction, learned the hard way, about what other people do.

Now watch what Mendez does, and what he pointedly does not do. He does not interpret. He does not push Will to talk about the sideshow. He does not rush him toward a breakthrough. He offers, first and only, a place where Will is treated with dignity and is not turned into a spectacle. Any of us who work with trauma will recognize the sequence, because it is the one Herman built into her stages of recovery and the one every good trauma model has kept since. Safety comes first. Stability comes first. The remembering and the grieving come later, and only when the ground is solid enough to hold them.

There is a reason for that order, and Stephen Porges gave us the biology of it. A nervous system braced for humiliation cannot do the work of healing. It is too busy surviving. Before a frightened person can look squarely at what happened to them, their body has to take in enough signals of safety to come off its guard. Will has to feel safe, and he has to feel met, before anything in him can move. What Mendez provides is close to what Bowlby called a secure base, a steady other from which a scared person can begin to venture out and try. Bessel van der Kolk spent a career reminding us that trauma lodges in the body and in our relationships, and that it heals in relationship too. The film lets us feel that truth rather than simply nod at it. For much of the work, the relationship is the treatment itself.

There is one more layer to Will’s wound that our diagnoses tend to skip, and it is the layer the film understands best. Will’s suffering runs deeper than loss. Underneath the loss is betrayal. The person who had power over him, the adult responsible for him, used that power to deny that he was a person at all. There is a name for that particular injury, borrowed from work with combat veterans. We call it moral injury, the lasting damage done to a person’s moral world when what is right is violated, above all by someone in a position of trust. Jonathan Shay wrote about soldiers betrayed by the leaders who were supposed to protect them, and Will fits that description exactly.

When a wound is a moral one, symptom relief is not enough. You can teach a morally injured person every grounding skill in the manual and still leave the real injury untouched, because what was broken was their standing as someone who deserved better. What Will needs, and what the circus quietly gives him, is that standing restored. He needs to be treated as a person worth having around, again and again, until it begins to overwrite the old verdict. I think we miss this in our clients more often than we know. We treat the anxiety and the dysregulation and never name the betrayal underneath, and then we wonder why the symptoms keep circling back.

The film is careful, too, about how Will finally changes, and this is the part I most want beginners to notice. Encouragement opens a door, but it does not walk him through it. What changes Will is doing. He watches, he tries, he falls into a river, he panics, and then he discovers he can move through the water on his own. Albert Bandura told us long ago that the strongest source of confidence is the felt evidence of having done a hard thing yourself, far more than any praise from other people. Will believes he can because he has. This is why we introduce things slowly, why we do not shove a client toward the deep end just because we can see they are capable before they can. Confidence that is handed to a person tends to slip away. Confidence that is earned, one attempt at a time, holds. The film lets Will fail before he succeeds, and that honesty is a gift to a student who thinks their job is to rescue.

All of this is why I put the film in front of people who are just starting out. What new clinicians fear, more than almost anything, is the moment they are sitting across from someone who is hurting and desperate for relief and they do not know what to do. It’s a reasonable fear. They may have written hundreds of case conceptualizations by the time they reach a real client, but as academic exercises, the way you write a paper to prove you did the reading. I have yet to watch a new clinician slide into real conceptualizing naturally in the room. It is so much faster to open a practice planner, pick a diagnosis, and click through a menu of measurable goals until a tidy treatment plan appears. The plan looks fine. It will pass an audit. And it has almost nothing to do with the actual person in the chair.

This is the exact spot where a good supervisor earns her keep, and where a good clinician becomes a great one. The best supervisors I know resist the urge to tell a supervisee what to do. They slow the student down and ask what they actually know about this person, what happened to them, what they learned to expect from other people, and why this behavior, the one that looks like the problem, might once have been the best solution available. They help the student take the theories we all memorized and lay them over one real human being. That is what conceptualization actually is, and it is the only honest way to build a treatment plan that is grounded in research and fitted to the person in the room rather than pulled off a shelf. It depends on something no dropdown menu can supply, which is a clinician who remembers, in her bones, how the theory connects to the outcome. The Butterfly Circus is a way back to that. It reminds a room full of anxious beginners that there is a why underneath every good thing we do, and that the why is finally a human one.

That’s true for beginning therapists. It’s also true for the field right now.

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I keep showing this 2009 film year after year, and I think it belongs in front of clinicians now more than at any point I can remember, because of the particular kinds of hurt walking into our offices. Many of us are treating a generation shaped by being watched. Will was put on a platform for strangers to stare at and rank, and I cannot show the film now without someone in the room thinking about what it does to grow up performing your life for an audience online, measured in public and found wanting. Add the loneliness so many people carry, an isolation our Surgeon General has compared to smoking most of a pack a day, and you get a clinical picture that looks a lot like Will before the circus arrived: a person convinced, from the outside in, that they are not worth belonging to anyone.

And then there is us, the clinicians. In 2026, so many of us are tired in a way that goes past ordinary fatigue. Many clinicians carry our own moral injury from working inside systems that ask them to give their patients less than they deserve, and one of the ways to survive that is to go a little numb. We may tell ourselves we “have good boundaries”. We may get efficient. We may stop feeling the histories we take in, because feeling all of them would flatten us. Some of that is healthy self-protection. But our biology is always nudging us to pull back from other people’s pain, and if we drift too far, we lose the very thing that made us good at this work. A film like The Butterfly Circus pulls us back for twenty minutes, and we return the better for it.

This is why I keep a small circus in my back pocket, for my students and for myself. We came into this work as empathic helpers. Something in us could not look away from suffering, and we decided to build a life around moving toward it instead. That impulse is the engine of everything we do, and it is also the thing most at risk of quietly wearing out. The theories are real and the research is real, and the careful, unglamorous sequence of good trauma treatment carries enormous weight. But none of it works when it’s run by someone who has forgotten why they came. Twenty minutes with Will and the circus works on us differently than a lecture on technique. It brings back the why, both the why behind our interventions and the why behind our own decision to do this at all. I have watched it bring a hardened room back to life. I have felt it do the same for me. That is worth far more than the time it costs.

In Backrooms, directed by Kane Parsons, a wall in the basement of a furniture store becomes a portal into the main character Clark’s unconscious. As Clark enters into it, we are confronted with what his mind has repressed. He stumbles on an endless maze of rooms to nowhere and is progressively drawn deeper and deeper into his worst nightmare.

More than anyone else, therapists know our minds have good reason for keeping certain traumatic memories out of conscious awareness as we go about our daily lives—they’re simply too disturbing to hold. If the repression is undone, so are we. And in this sci-fi horror film, Parsons—who at 20 years old is the youngest filmmaker ever to open a box office film at number one—takes us into exactly this territory: the unconscious not as something vague or theoretical, but as a force that can destroy us.

Clark is played with soulful conviction by Chiwetel Ejiofor and appears to be depressed about his failed career as an architect and his recent failed relationship. When the portal entices him in, a labyrinth of jaundiced corridors, stairwells, and rooms replicate themselves infinitely around him. After several therapy sessions where an increasingly distraught Clark hides his discovery and then stops showing up for therapy entirely, his therapist, Dr. Mary Kline—played by Renate Reinsve with hauntingly contrived intelligence—follows him into this netherworld.

What Parsons has built on the other side of the showroom portal is a spatial rendering of the unconscious—the floor plan of a life half-lived. It’s haunting and disquieting. As I watched the movie, I was taken back to a moment 40 years ago at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, when I entered—yes, entered—Marcel Duchamp’s “Étant Donnés” (it’s a room). Peepholes drilled into an old barn door drew me across a dim antechamber toward what lay on the other side: a mangled nude woman sprawled in a stream, clutching a lit gas lamp. My professor considered Duchamp’s tableau a visceral rendering of our human temptation to glimpse the horror of our own unconscious, and this resonated with me. What hit me as I squinted through those peepholes wasn’t what I saw; it was what I felt: repulsion, curiosity, allure, grief.

Watching Parsons’ movie arouses similar feelings as it dramatizes the reality that what we bury rarely stays completely buried. Clark isn’t simply lost in a building; he’s attacked by his own unrealized potential, ambushed by his moribund dreams. His therapist refuses to reassure him or soften the truth of his predicament. Instead, she informs him that the dismal state of his life is indeed the product of his own poor choices and maladaptive coping strategies. This honesty, in the economy of Clark’s unconscious, is punishable by a fate worse than death: he forces Dr. Kline to enact a twisted and humiliating role-play that echoes one of their previous therapy sessions. Although Dr. Kline ultimately flees and escapes the monster, she ends up condemned not by fire and brimstone but by something more sinister—a shadowy research corporation that controls the backrooms.

As a therapist, I can easily imagine Clark’s journey having gone differently. He reminds me of some of my clients in Santa Monica who arrive in treatment carrying some version of his split. They have financial goals, but they don’t have emotional ones. Many are younger software engineers who earn ten times the national average; however, the rest of their lives suffer as they’re compelled to spend 12–14 hours a day in front of their computers, leaving little time for meaning, purpose, or meaningful relationships. Like Clark, their souls are yearning for more, but they’re wearing golden handcuffs. They’ve persevered in their careers in ways that appear practical while feeling less and less like themselves. Depression often grows to fill this schism.

Clark’s depression carries a flavor of chronic resignation, and the film captures that condition with remarkable psychological clarity. The monster in the film is self-betrayal incarnate. It arises in the subconscious because Clark has let his dreams and hopes die. What he’s let go of comes back as a menace. What he’s silenced comes back as a roar. There’s an idea, attributed to Freud, that whatever is repressed returns thricefold. For Clark, his self-betrayal returns closer to tenfold. The film’s labyrinthine corridors, stairwells, and rooms represent that internal condition. The spaces seem generated by a psyche crushed under the weight of its own ideals. Drinking blunts his grief, shame, and desire while the signals that might have informed him that his life was going off course are muted. Clark has been unable to create his future while remaining anaesthetized and sealed inside his past.

Watching Backrooms, I found myself wondering what I would do if Clark were my patient. I’d want to reconnect him with the dreams and ideals he’d given up on, to help him struggle to find language for the cost of his sacrifices in the hopes that he might realize the difference between earning a living and designing a fulfilling life. I’d want to reignite Clark’s passion for architecture in small, concrete ways: a drawing class. A museum visit. An architecture tour. Time spent leafing through old portfolios. The goal wouldn’t be a dramatic reinvention. It would be to help him find a path back to agency so he could reawaken the part of himself that still knows how to imagine.

Our work as therapists in such cases isn’t just to help clients speak their truth, mourn losses, reduce drinking and numbing, and recover contact with vitalizing work. It’s to help them relate from a more genuine place. Someone who hides from himself often hides from others with equal skill. The work of therapy would be to help him become available to contact, honesty, mutuality, and possibly even love again—to show up without disguise, and discover that connection depends on presence, not performance.

Part of the psychological power of Backrooms lies in the way it treats unrealized potential as a psychic force. Clark’s abandoned architecture, his sales persona, his drinking, his despair, and his damaged capacity for love all belong to the same story. He’s lived inside a long series of self-betrayals. To market his furniture store, for example, Clark once dressed up as a pirate; that inauthentic version of him incarnates as a monster, bent on making him pay the price for his inauthenticity.

For Clark, healing is foreclosed by self-deception and lack of accountability. With our clients, the path to reconnecting with their desires begins when they stop trading their soul for comfort, and consider what it might look like to seek fulfillment in work, show up authentically, and love others in their lives genuinely and imperfectly.

There’s a quote of unknown origin about hell that fits this film: on your last day on earth, the person you became will meet the person you could have become. Backrooms makes this encounter visceral. The film presents the unconscious not as something we have, but as something that inhabits us and can ultimately destroy us if we regularly ignore its invitation toward growth and wholeness.

I was entranced by Parsons’ comprehensive vision and the psychological portrait he offered. The film posits that nobody can help you but yourself—that the monster appears when we get caught in our losses in ways that lead to nihilism rather than action. If great art exists to hold up a mirror to our unconscious—and incite us to live fully while there’s still time—then Backrooms, like Duchamp’s Étant Donnés, is a masterpiece.

Every relationship begins with a script, one handed to us by our families, our cultures and religions, our individual experiences of intimacy. We adopt ideas and rules about who should lead, who should follow, who’s expected to be vulnerable, and who should avoid vulnerability at all costs. And the promise of each script is always the same: if we follow our directions correctly, we’re guaranteed to be led toward harmonious connection, belonging, and perhaps even love.

This promise lies at the heart of British director Harry Lighton’s poignant romantic comedy, Pillion, starring Alexander Skarsgård and Harry Melling (based on the novel Box Hill, by Adam Mars-Jones). The surface plot follows Colin (Melling), a naive and nondescript young man who enters a consensual dominant-submissive relationship with Ray (Skarsgård), a tough biker who distinctly resembles a quintessential Tom of Finland illustration. (The term pillion, by the way, refers to the secondary seat on a motorbike–which Colin is taught to occupy as part of the relational terms with Ray.) Something about Ray’s certainty and confidence about his social/sexual role offers the submissive Colin an organizing gateway to erotic intimacy that he has struggled to find elsewhere.

Thus begins Colin’s exciting, adventurous—and at times painful, embarrassing, and confusing–discovery of BDSM (an acronym for a broad range of consensual practices involving bondage, discipline, dominance, submission, and sadomasochism). But entertaining and absorbing as these courting sequences are, Pillion is not a deep-dive exposé of BDSM, nor does it intend to be.

Instead, it’s one highly specific story about a relationship that uses the rituals of BDSM as a script to realize the potential of human connection. In fact, one of the most remarkable features of this delightful and deeply moving film is that as the characters negotiate the rules and expectations of their explicitly assigned sub/dom roles, we witness two people simply trying to know one another and be known by one another. BDSM has been written about extensively, particularly in terms of its exploration of power. But what struck me about its use in the movie was its fascinating emphasis on negotiation.

As Colin learns the rules of engagement from Ray, he tries his best to contort himself into the very rigid role he’s expected to play. But once he’s past the entry point, and their dynamic is established, he begins to test boundaries. He takes creative risks as he searches for more room to express his feelings and desires. And ironically, the emotional conflicts and negotiations that result emerge with greater clarity than we often see in many “traditional” relationships.

As a therapist, I for one found myself thinking less about kink and fringe and sexual idiosyncrasies, and more about every couple with whom I’ve worked: couples longing not only to be loved, but to be recognized by another person and know that they matter to them.

While performing a prescribed role can invite the possibility of such recognition, following a script doesn’t necessarily allow each partner to show up with all of their truth, nuance, and vulnerable desires to connect. True mutual recognition requires a willingness for both participants to improvise, to play, and to acknowledge one another as a uniquely complex human being.

But, as well-known researcher Brené Brown points out, fitting in isn’t the same thing as belonging. Belonging means taking the risk of showing up as we are and asking to be seen and heard by the person in front of us, even if that defies what’s safe and familiar to them.

No role—not even one with highly defined rules—can substitute for the extraordinarily vulnerable and challenging work of inviting and allowing another person to know who we really are. And ultimately, this is what Pillion exquisitely highlights. The movie isn’t asking whether sub/dom romance is good or bad. It’s asking the most essential question of any relationship: How do expected roles both help and prevent us from getting closer to one another? And how can we find enough playfulness to inhabit roles truthfully, without getting stuck in the fear of rejection?

Alexander Skarsgård gives perhaps the most emotionally intelligent performance of his career, because he clearly understands this dilemma. Ray is magnetic and cinematically iconic in his initial certainty, but when he discovers enough bravery to let that certainty slip away, his greatest power emerges—not in dominance and control, but in raw vulnerability, longing, and unadulterated joy. When he finally receives Colin’s invitation to show up beyond the expected parameters of his impenetrable role, a refreshing and vital embodiment of masculinity is revealed, one that requires the will to connect and the capacity to access one’s emotions.

That insight extends beyond the film itself. Recently, when Alexander’s father—the actor Stellan Skarsgård—was asked how he felt about his son playing a gay character in a BDSM movie, he responded: “Oh, I have no problem seeing him do BDSM. If he acts badly, I have big problems.” The actor’s job, it seems, is to tell the truth about what it means to be human. And as it turns out, that’s also a therapist’s job.

The longer I practice psychotherapy, the more invested I become in helping people to find balance between the stability of familiar roles and who they are beyond them.

Fortunately for moviegoers, Harry Melling as Colin brilliantly illustrates this dynamic balance. His performance shows us how scripts can help us to find our way to intimacy. But also, and more importantly, he shows us how transcending scripts—imaginatively and playfully—can lead to our ultimate relational goals: to see and be seen, and to hear and be heard.

*****

Explore more movie recommendations from your colleagues in 4 Top Therapist Recommended Movies (Part I) and 4 Top Therapist Recommended Movies (Part II).