Anthony Hopkins continues his strong, late-career run of films (which includes the recent One Life, Netflix’s The Two Popes and his Oscar-winning turn in The Father) in this sedate but engrossing adaptation of Mark St Germain’s stage play, Freud’s Last Session.

The film opens in September 1939, two days before Britain’s declaration of war against Germany. London is being sandbagged, its children evacuated to the country. Barrage balloons are already floating above the city.

A still from Freud’s Last Session starring Anthony Hopkins and Matthew Goode

But imminent hostilities are no deterrence to Oxford don C.S. Lewis, who sets out to pay a call on the Hampstead home of Sigmund Freud (Hopkins), who now lives in London with his daughter Anna after escaping the Nazi regime in Vienna in 1938.

This is no mere social call. Lewis, a stout defender of the Christian faith, has booked a tête-à-tête with the world-famous father of psychoanalysis and avowed atheist. The subject for discussion? Nothing less than the existence of God.

St Germain (with Matthew Brown, the film’s director and...