A camera turns on inside a therapist's office and refuses to look away from either side of the couch. Stutz is Jonah Hill's documentary portrait of his own psychiatrist, Phil Stutz, built from conversations that keep breaking their own frame.
What is Stutz about?
The film sets up a simple premise: Hill, sitting across from the man who has treated him for years, asks Stutz to explain the visual tools he uses with patients — sketches on index cards meant to make abstract emotional work feel concrete. Early on the two agree to shoot in black and white on a bare set, a choice that keeps drawing attention to itself as the sessions go on. What starts as an explainer on therapeutic technique widens into something less controlled, as Stutz talks about his own health and his early life, and Hill periodically steps outside the therapist's frame to admit how exposed the process has left him. The documentary keeps circling back to the tools themselves — the Ladder, the Snapshot, the Maze — sketched out on cards as Stutz talks, treating them less as jargon than as ideas either man can pick up and turn over. Confrontations, family stories, and clinical concepts sit alongside each other without much narration to smooth the transitions.
About the cast
Phil Stutz appears as himself, drawing on decades of clinical practice to walk through the ideas that structure the film. Jonah Hill, credited as director, sits opposite him as both subject and interviewer, a dual role the film treats as part of its subject matter rather than a formal complication to hide.
Context & significance
Stutz arrived on a major streaming platform in 2022 as part of a wave of documentaries by actors turning the camera on people who shaped their private lives rather than their careers. Its stripped-down setup — one room, one set, two people talking — puts the emphasis squarely on the exchange between subject and filmmaker rather than on visual spectacle.
Watching Stutz on Ktime
Stutz streams on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, and the film is free to read about here without an account. Watching it requires only a free K-Time login, with the interface itself presented in Farsi for the Iranian diaspora audience the platform serves.