Harvard psychiatrist Armand Nicholi taught a popular course on “The Question of God,” examining Sigmund Freud’s atheism and C.S. Lewis’s faith. Now a related Sony theatrical film imagines that the two met in London shortly before Freud’s death. The result is a fascinating historical drama probing their intellectual, emotional, psychological, and spiritual development. Anthony Hopkins is masterful as Freud. Matthew Goode plays Lewis.

Nicholi’s course inspired a book, television series, and stage play, from which this film derives. Amid Nazi advances, Freud moved from Vienna to London in 1938. Lewis taught at Oxford. There is no record of them ever meeting, but the film is a valuable tool to show how their beliefs and psyches might have weathered careful mutual scrutiny — and to understand two competing worldviews, atheism and theism.