A routine psychiatric intake becomes a reckoning between two men, neither of whom is who he appears to be.
Synopsis
A patient arrives for a new intake. The psychiatrist has his files ready, his tea poured, his morning cleared. Across ninety minutes in one room, the conversation between them moves from therapy to negotiation to something neither of them planned for. Both men came to this session prepared. Only one of them came for the reason he claimed.
The Film
Dr. Elias Chen is a respected psychiatrist. Board-certified, published, admired. His home office sits adjacent to his family kitchen. His wife and two children are fifteen feet away through a closed door. On a quiet Saturday morning, he's taking one appointment before a family trip to the aquarium.
Toby Wade is his new patient. Referred by a GP. Trouble sleeping. A general sense of dread. Nothing that should complicate a Saturday.
What happens instead is a conversation that neither man can walk out of.
The Session is a two-hander, set in a single room, unfolding in close to real time. It's a psychological thriller built from language rather than incident. Two people, two chairs, and the slow realization that both of them knew exactly what this appointment was going to be.
The film is a study of institutional harm: the kind that gets authorized on paper, delivered with courtesy, and carries professional credibility into every room it enters. It's about what happens when a wound and the person who inflicted it are left alone in a room with a closed door, a kettle on the sideboard, and ninety minutes on the clock.
Tone
The Session lives in the tradition of chamber thrillers where the threat is dialogue. Films that trust the room, the camera, and two actors willing to sit in a scene until it breaks.
The visual approach is grounded and contained. No flashbacks. No voiceover. No scored emotional cues telegraphing which man to trust. The camera stays in the room the way the audience stays in the room. Uncomfortably close, and unable to leave.
Writer's Statement
I wrote this script because I kept thinking about the rooms where people get decided on.
Not courtrooms. Not hearings. Smaller rooms. The kind where a professional with a degree on the wall looks at a person for forty-five minutes and writes a paragraph that will follow them for the rest of their life. The paragraph sounds clinical. It sounds considered. It sounds like someone's best judgment. And sometimes it is. And sometimes it's a paragraph that was going to get written regardless of who walked through the door.
The Session is about one of those paragraphs and the person it followed. It's about the specific violence of being articulated by someone with better language than you, in a record you can't see, in a room you didn't ask to be in. And it's about what it takes to go back to that room years later and make the person who wrote it look at you. Psychologically. Practically. Privately.
I wanted to make a film that doesn't let the audience off the hook. No catharsis scene. No gotcha. No tidy resolution where the wound closes and everyone goes home wiser. Just two people in a room, trying to out-language each other, while the stakes keep changing underneath them.
I'm making this as a producer for the same reason I'm acting in it. I can't wait for someone to let me tell this story. The only way it gets made is if I make it.
Simon Shih
Cast
as Toby Wade
as Dr. Elias Chen
Additional cast to be announced.
Production
The Session is being produced independently through Page 4 Films. Principal photography dates are to be determined, and the film will shoot in the Atlanta metro area. The project is self-financed through contract income, supplemented by grant support.
The film is written, produced, and co-led by Simon Shih, with a separate director to be announced.
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