Steve Carell spends much of “The Patient” chained to the floor of a basement, acting as a psychotherapist to his captor, a serial killer named Sam (Domhnall Gleeson). Not only does Carell’s Dr. Alan Strauss toil around the mind of a killer, but he also eats takeout with him and offers him advice because his life depends on it. Sam knows enough that he needs help, but he has gone about it in such unethical ways. Sometimes Alan is even speed-therapizing, as when there’s a potential future victim in the boiler room, and Sam’s urges to kill seem ready to take over. 

“The Patient,” created by Joel Fields and Joseph Weisberg, tries to engage true crime culture by finding its own snazzy way into the mind of a killer while engaging with our hunger to psychoanalyze a disturbed character. The premise of it runs out, leading to a runtime that does a disservice to the pieces that can be effective within one man’s quest to get his captor to learn what it feels like to be in someone else’s shoes. “The Patient” is a long journey to create empathy in the darkest of minds, but overall it makes for an overlong, dull mind game. 

Directed in part by Chris Long of FX’s “The Americans,” “The Patient” is stuck on how to make this often two-hander set-up visually interesting; instead, we get more dread from the details of the basement, like the unlocked glass sliding doors that are ten feet in front of Alan’s reach. Episode by episode, “The Patient” repeats beats of looking at Carell’s face, exhausted, collecting his thoughts, stuck. Some daydreams take us to his past, and to his therapist, tangents that become more interesting than the frantic therapy sessions. 

Known as the “John Doe Killer” for how he steals the wallets of his victims, Sam proves to be the dull symbol of a regular American psycho. For how searching the role itself is—so desperately trying to say something about Dunkin’-sipping, compulsive, antisocial mama’s boys who like Kenny Chesney—Gleeson comes up with so little. The portrait of a serial killer painted here is too heavy on the presentation, with extra bushy eyebrows to go with extra vacant stares and the flatness of Gleeson’s line-delivery bleeds into the killer’s general monotone presence. Gleeson portrays this killer as a robotic brat. Instead of becoming more chilling, it’s eye-rolling.