In his captivity, Alan spends time thinking about his relationship with his son Ezra, who became Orthodox (an “extreme Jew,” Alan calls him) and estranged from the family. There is a sentimental undercurrent to “The Patient” that rises to the surface throughout, in large part thanks to Carell’s contemplative performance.

“The Patient” does not favor showing violence, but it also doesn’t know how to make a sudden cut to black, usually with a surprised character gasping, register as all that terrifying. Brief moments of terror are presented ho-hum, as with a murder in parking lot that’s staged with little flair, and continually stretches the convenience that this serial killer still has not been caught after all this.

Part of this comes from how Sam is portrayed-the series doesn’t lean enough into the absurdity of the concept, of this free-therapy-achieving captivity mixed with Sam's extra bad behavior. Instead of becoming more chilling, it’s eye-rolling. Gleeson portrays this killer as a robotic brat. The portrait of a serial killer painted here is too heavy on the presentation, with extra bushy eyebrows to go with extra vacant stares and the flatness of Gleeson’s line-delivery bleeds into the killer’s general monotone presence. For how searching the role itself is-so desperately trying to say something about Dunkin’-sipping, compulsive, antisocial mama’s boys who like Kenny Chesney-Gleeson comes up with so little. Known as the ' John Doe Killer' for how he steals the wallets of his victims, Sam proves to be the dull symbol of a regular American psycho. Some daydreams take us to his past, and to his therapist, tangents that become more interesting than the frantic therapy sessions.

'The Patient' is a long journey to create empathy in the darkest of minds, but overall it makes for an overlong, dull mind game.ĭirected in part by Chris Long of FX's 'The Americans,' 'The Patient' is stuck on how to make this often two-hander set-up visually interesting instead, we get more dread from the details of the basement, like the unlocked glass sliding doors that are ten feet in front of Alan's reach. Episode by episode, 'The Patient' repeats beats of looking at Carell’s face, exhausted, collecting his thoughts, stuck.

The premise of it runs out, leading to a runtime that does a disservice to the pieces that can be effective within one man’s quest to get his captor to learn what it feels like to be in someone else’s shoes. “The Patient,” created by Joel Fields and Joseph Weisberg, tries to engage true crime culture by finding its own snazzy way into the mind of a killer while engaging with our hunger to psychoanalyze a disturbed character.

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