“Basic Psych” is No Basic Morality Play
Something about Pittsburgh and the surrounding area is a prime location for filmmakers to make their psychological thrillers. Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs and David Fincher’s Mindhunter series were both shot in Western Pennsylvania. Now, Melissa Martin’s Basic Psych boasts that it was fully shot in Pittsburgh. Following in the footsteps of those who came before, Basic Psych probes the psyche of a killer and questions the safety of those who find themselves in his orbit.
Basic Psych begins on Halloween night. Trick-or-treaters come and go at the house of a psychiatrist. The holiday festivities are cut short when the psychiatrist is killed in cold blood. This murder rocks the world of Dr. Stuart Prince (Michael Cerveris), another local psychiatrist. At home, his life with his wife (Siena Goines) and daughter is picture perfect, but at work, things aren’t so rosy. Stuart has a new patient, Dan (David Conrad), who’s skittish about therapy. He doesn’t want anyone to know he’s coming and wants Stuart to take no notes about their time together. Despite getting a weird feeling from Dan, Stuart continues to treat him. That decision proves to be a mistake as Dan pushes the limits of the doctor/patient confidentiality protections.
Courtesy of Basic Psych
Cerveris, a West Virginia native, makes for the perfect psychiatrist. He’s calm and collected, but thinking so many steps ahead of his patient. Even as he grows more tense and wary of Dan’s actions, Stuart maintains a restrained sensibility. Cerveris is able to remain in control as Stuart — never pushing for a louder style of acting, always relying on his ability to sell emotion with the smallest of gestures. Conrad’s Dan makes for an excellent foil to Cerveris’ Stuart. The two feel like two sides of the same coin, but the film makes it hard to pin down exactly what makes them so similar. It’s a game of cat and mouse that’s more subtle than it is reliant on action sequences.
The dynamic of these two men keeps Basic Psych interesting because the script regularly returns to the idea of ethical decision-making. When does maintaining doctor/patient confidentiality end and concern for the outside world begin? If a patient admits to a past murder in a therapy session, it’s a bit of a gray area. In order for the therapist to be required to report it to the police, the patient must be considered a current danger to themself or others. When Basic Psych is mining the moral conflict this predicament presents, it’s at its most compelling. Even though Basic Psych doesn’t reach the heights of its fellow Western Pennsylvania psychological thrillers, Martin’s work here proves those films aren’t far off in her directing career.
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