Therapy Notes

Thriller · Runtime 2:37 · Aspect Ratio 16:9 · 2025

Overview

Therapy Notes follows Alice, a therapist attempting to reach Norman, a court-mandated client who does not believe anything is wrong with him. Alice understands the damage an abusive male figure can leave inside a child because she has lived with that damage herself. She believes therapy requires real contact: not a treatment performed on a patient, but a relationship between two people willing to risk honesty. Norman, however, refuses to enter that relationship. He treats Alice as a tool, the session as an obligation, and vulnerability as weakness.

As Alice tries to see beneath Norman’s controlled surface, the session begins to take a toll on her own buried wounds. What begins as clinical work becomes something more personal, more dangerous, and more costly. Therapy Notes is about the limits of therapy when only one person is willing to be vulnerable.

Director Statement

Therapy Notes came from my interest in Gestalt therapy and the idea that therapy is not simply something a therapist does to a patient. In Gestalt theory, therapy is a relationship. It requires contact. It requires both people in the room to be willing to engage honestly, to move past performance, defense, and control, and to risk arriving at the core of the problem.

Alice, the therapist, became a healer because she understands the impact an abusive male figure can have on a child. That knowledge is not theoretical for her. It lives in her body. Her empathy is real, but so is her vulnerability. She believes that to reach Norman, she must stay open enough to see him clearly — even when what she sees begins to disturb something unresolved inside herself.

Norman does not come to therapy with that same willingness. He is there because the court requires him to be there. He does not want to be vulnerable. He does not believe he needs help. He sees Alice not as a person in relationship with him, but as an object within a process: a function, a tool, a box to check.

I wanted the film to investigate the frustration and emotional cost of that imbalance. Alice is trying to create contact with someone who refuses contact. She is trying to treat someone who does not want to be treated. Beneath Norman’s controlled surface, she senses the same abusive force that once wounded her. The session begins to reach her inner child, the part of her still crying out for protection.

The final exchange, “Same time next week,” is simple but brutal. For Norman, it is procedural. Another appointment. Another requirement. For Alice, it lands differently. She knows he will return. She knows the work may continue. She also knows that each session may ask her to endure more of the very damage she entered the profession to heal.

At its core, Therapy Notes asks a painful question: when therapy depends on relationship, what happens when only one person in the room is willing to be human?