Rating: NR | Runtime: 102 minutes
Release Date: April 11th, 2025 (USA)
Studio: Brainstorm Media
Director(s): Tolga Karaçelik
Writer(s): Tolga Karaçelik

We finish what we start.

Despite adding the words Psycho Therapy and a colon to the title, the combination never appears during the runtime of Tolga Karaçelik’s The Shallow Tale of a Writer Who Decided to Write about a Serial Killer. Used to give audiences (and surely the studio’s marketing) a shorter label to describe the piece, it does prove to be a concise way to forge expectations. Because “therapy” is involved once you consider that Keane (John Magaro) and Suzie (Britt Lower) are talking about divorce. A “psycho” is too considering the person they hire to be their marriage counselor is really a retired serial killer (Steve Buscemi’s Kollmick). There’s just a lot of additional context necessary to bridge those words together.

It’s no surprise this marriage is on the rocks. We see it via an opening dinner party wherein two couples lead Keane on with morbid curiosity more than interest as far as learning what his new book is about. He doesn’t catch on and genuinely seeks to clarify the details of his 40,000BC-set Slovenian romance while Suzie looks on with stone-faced indifference and fatigue. Keane innocently seeks approval while she lays bare her frustration with his naïveté. It’s not just about this long-gestating novel idea that’s going nowhere, though. She’s become sick of the reality that everything he does goes nowhere. So much so that she feels more mother than wife. Always making their decisions. Always paying their bills. Always keeping him alive.

And by airing this belief in order to put herself in the headspace needed to finally move on, you can’t blame Suzie for reading too far into what occurs in the aftermath. She’s pretty much told Keane he’s an albatross and that his gravy train is leaving the station, so finding books with the titles “Toxicology” and “How to Get Away with Murder” do force her to wonder if he’s planning his revenge via murder. We know this isn’t the case, though, because Keane was given those books by Kollmick as research into the topic of this eccentric’s former career. As a fan of the author’s first novel, he felt the desire to give him the first chance at writing about the exact sort of “sexy” topic audiences crave. He’ll run Keane through his entire process: stalking, killing, disposal, and survival.

Karaçelik understands the absurdity of this scenario (similar to “Based on a True Story” in many respects) and decides to really amp up that farcical nature as he pulls his characters through. First: he creates a misreading of who Kollmick is so that Keane can artificially bring him into his familial fold without raising any red flags as a “marriage counselor.” Second: he fosters a misreading of Keane’s true interest in murder so Suzie’s paranoia can coax her into the men’s “professional” relationship. Third: he lets the inevitable collision course of these misreadings to play out as off-kilter as possible. Where that leads won’t astound you considering how Keane and Suzie have been presented, but it’s nice to see that Kollmick’s presence is a salve for both.

If nothing else, Keane agreeing to let Kollmick be the Don Quixote to his Sancho allows him the space to get out of the pedantic circles his pretentiousness has trapped him within. Is he in way over his head? Sure. That’s what makes it fun for us. Magaro excels at being a raw nerve of empathy and it serves this role well opposite the equally pragmatic Suzie and Kollmick. He spirals out of control emotionally so Lower and Buscemi can calmly tell him everything is okay as long as they don’t lose focus. The best moments of the film are when Suzie and Kollmick become stuck in a cycle of literalism while Keane tries to snap them out of it just as they do for him when he’s overcome with crippling fear.

It culminates into an entertaining third act that wraps up the myriad plot threads from the first two. Yes, it can be a bit trying to get through the latter en route to that payoff, but I do think the former is worth your patience. Because Karaçelik must set everything up and his hands are kind of tied when dealing with Suzie and Kollmick’s monotonal existences. That robotic sense of propulsion allows Keane’s eventual untethering to prove fun, but it does ultimately render a good portion of the film to become monotone itself. Thankfully the ends justify the means once Karaçelik goes full speed into the metaphor that marriage is similar to murder. Or, more specifically, that the adrenaline rush of one just might be the jumpstart necessary to reinvigorate the other.

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[L-R] Steve Buscemi as “Kollmick”, Britt Lower as “Suzie” and John Magaro as “Keane” in the Dark Comedy, Thriller PSYCHO THERAPY: THE SHALLOW TALE OF A WRITER WHO DECIDED TO WRITE ABOUT A SERIAL KILLER, a Brainstorm Media release. Photo courtesy of Brainstorm Media.