Netflix’s Therapy Done Right puts a former psychiatrist on Ricardo Darín’s couch

In Therapy Done Right, Ricardo Darín takes the analyst’s chair and Diego Peretti plays the man who comes to him for help. Of the two, Peretti is the one who trained for the chair. He studied medicine and worked as a psychiatrist in Buenos Aires public hospitals before acting slowly pushed the profession out of his life. Netflix has cast the former doctor as the patient.

Therapy Done Right, released in Spanish as Lo dejamos acá, is an Argentine dark comedy and a Netflix original film directed by Hernán Goldfrid and written by Emanuel Diez. The premise, in Netflix’s own synopsis: a pragmatic psychoanalyst who has lost faith in the usual methods of his discipline begins crossing ethical lines with his patients, and it seems to work, until a novelist with writer’s block walks into his consulting room. Darín plays the analyst. Peretti plays the novelist. Antonia Bengoechea, Inés Efron, Andrea Politti, Patricia Echegoyen, Carlos Santamaría and Miriam Odorico complete the cast.

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The Spanish title is a line every patient in Buenos Aires knows. “Lo dejamos acá” means, roughly, “we’ll stop here”: the sentence an analyst uses to close a session, often at the moment the patient would rather keep talking. Several of the film’s international titles keep the formula, in French, in European Portuguese, in Korean, in Swedish. The English title makes a different claim, one about method. Between the two sits the question the premise sets up: whether the rules of the session are the treatment, or only the furniture around it.

The setting gives that question weight. Argentina has more psychologists per head than any other country, about 222 for every 100,000 people according to World Health Organization figures, and roughly half of them work in Buenos Aires. Therapy there carries little of the stigma it has elsewhere. A comedy about an analyst who breaks the rules is, for that audience, less a satire of an exotic profession than a portrait of someone they might see next week, at the usual hour.

Peretti’s own history sharpens the joke. He graduated in medicine, did his psychiatry residency at Hospital Castex and became chief resident at Hospital Argerich, while already acting in the theatre. The police series Poliladrón made him a television face, and he left medicine at the point where the next step would have been opening his own practice. He has said in interviews that the artistic discourse interested him more than the scientific one. In Therapy Done Right he occupies the side of the room he chose to leave.

Darín comes to the chair as producer as well as star. The film is made by Kenya Films, the company he runs with his son, Chino Darín, and Federico Posternak, and his niece Antonia Bengoechea, daughter of the late actress Alejandra Darín, is in the cast. It is his first feature since Argentina, 1985, and it follows the worldwide run of his Netflix series El Eternauta. Speaking to radio El Observador, Darín said the project was born from the wish to work with Peretti again, and described the story as strange and, he thinks, funny. “But it isn’t only funny,” he added. “It also makes you reflect, think. And it’s going to be controversial. It isn’t easy to digest.”

The two actors last shared a film in La señal, nineteen years ago. Goldfrid knows both from his own beginnings. His first feature, Música en espera, cast Peretti as a composer who cannot find the melody for a film score. His thriller Tesis sobre un homicidio gave Darín a criminal-law expert convinced that one of his students is a killer. A blocked artist and a man who trusts his own method too much: the director has filmed both figures before. Here, the premise puts them in the same room, with one of them paid to listen to the other.

Emanuel Diez, the screenwriter, arrives from Argentine television comedy, with credits on El encargado, Nada and Coppola, el representante. Therapy Done Right is his move to a feature built around two voices.

The credits point to how much of the film rests on sound and surface. The score is by the Spanish composer Roque Baños, whose work runs from Fede Álvarez’s Evil Dead to Ron Howard‘s In the Heart of the Sea. Cinematography is by Rodrigo Pulpeiro, editing by Andrés Quaranta, production design by Daniel Gimelberg, costumes by Jam Monti. Argentine press accounts describe a story that leans on the dialogue between analyst and patient, and on the slow change in a relationship that begins inside a clinical frame. A two-hander of that kind has few places to hide. The room, the distance between two chairs, the music that enters when nobody speaks: in the genre, those carry what the dialogue cannot. How Goldfrid’s team treats that space is the one thing a synopsis cannot tell.

The therapist-patient story has a long screen history, from Hollywood farce such as What About Bob? and Analyze This to the Israeli series BeTipul and its American version, In Treatment, where the session itself became the format. Therapy Done Right approaches the form from the Argentine side, where the analyst is a familiar figure rather than a novelty, and where a comedy about bad therapy meets an audience with firm opinions about good therapy. Darín’s word, controversial, names the risk. A comedy that lets the rule-breaker win for a while also asks the audience to enjoy the breach.

For Netflix, the film is also a festival calling card. It had its world premiere at the 74th San Sebastián International Film Festival, where Darín is the face on this year’s official poster and where he received the Donostia Award in 2017. From there it skips a commercial theatrical run and goes straight to a global release, another Argentine original built around the country’s most exported actor.

The premise contains its own trap. If an analyst who ignores the rules gets results, the rules start to look like decoration, and the profession’s boundaries like habit. Yet boundaries exist for the patient who does not fit the method, and that patient is exactly who the synopsis sends through the door. The film leaves open the question no session closes: when breaking the rules of therapy works, who were the rules protecting, the patient or the analyst?

Therapy Done Right had its world premiere in San Sebastián on Tuesday, September 22, and arrives worldwide on Netflix on Friday, October 16, 2026. The film runs 97 minutes and is in Spanish.

Is Therapy Done Right a movie or a series? A feature film, 97 minutes long. It is not a series.

Who is in the cast of Therapy Done Right? Ricardo Darín plays the psychoanalyst and Diego Peretti the blocked novelist, with Antonia Bengoechea, Inés Efron, Andrea Politti, Patricia Echegoyen, Carlos Santamaría and Miriam Odorico.

What is the original title? Lo dejamos acá. The film is Argentine, directed by Hernán Goldfrid and produced by Kenya Films.

Is it based on a true story? Nothing in the promotional material presents it as based on real events. It is a fiction feature written by Emanuel Diez.

Where can I watch Therapy Done Right? On Netflix, worldwide, from October 16, 2026.

Cast

Photos: The Movie Database (TMDB)

Tags: Netflix, Diego Peretti, Ricardo Darín, Therapy Done Right, Hernán Goldfrid, Kenya Films

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