Sibyl
A psychotherapist who leaves her practice to write a novel takes on one last patient, an actress whose crisis pulls her into a ruin of her own making.
Cannes Film Festival, In Competition, 2019
Sibyl, a therapist wanting to return to writing, winds down her practice but keeps one patient, a young actress in the middle of an affair on a film shoot. As she secretly mines the woman's confessions for her book, the boundaries between them collapse and her own past resurfaces.
The film dramatises transference and countertransference from the analyst's chair, showing a clinician's professional frame giving way and her own unravelling. It is a provocative text on boundaries, use of the patient, and the therapist's blind spots. It screened in competition at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival.
Details
- 2019
- France
- French
- Film