Stutz

Stutz sits Jonah Hill and the psychiatrist Phil Stutz opposite each other in a spare studio, where the actor asks his clinician to explain their work together. Stutz walks through his practical method, the set of visualisation techniques he calls the Tools, sketching each on a card as he speaks. Partway through, Hill stops and admits the room is a set, the timeline compressed, the wig fake, and the conversation folds back on the fact of its own making.

Critics read the film as a study of the frame it keeps breaking. Reviewers noted how much Hill discloses, and how the camera reverses the direction of attention: the patient turns the lens on his clinician and asks him to be the subject. Some found the intimacy affecting; others questioned whether a therapist can be filmed working without the recording altering what the room is for.

For a psychodynamic clinician it offers a public case to think with. Stutz practises out loud, directive and warm, handing over concrete exercises in a manner far from analytic neutrality, while Hill's fondness for him raises familiar questions about idealisation and the limits of self-disclosure.