Final Analysis

Final Analysis is a 1992 American neo-noir erotic thriller film directed by Phil Joanou and written by Wesley Strick from a concept by forensic psychiatrist Robert H. Berger.[2] It stars Richard Gere, Kim Basinger, Uma Thurman, Eric Roberts, Keith David, and Paul Guilfoyle. The executive producers were Gere and Maggie Wilde.[1] The film received mixed critical reviews,[3] but was positively compared to the works of Alfred Hitchcock, particularly Vertigo.[4] It is the final film of director of photography Jordan Cronenweth.

Plot
In San Francisco, Freudian psychiatrist Isaac Barr treats Diana Baylor, a woman with obsessive–compulsive disorder suffering from frightening and horrific childhood memories, which include images of her drunken father and his death in a fire for which she wasn't blamed. Isaac becomes concerned about Diana's obsessive-compulsive habit of checking a handgun her sister gave her. Diana suggests Isaac meet her sister, Heather Evans, who knows things about their parents that may shed light on her neuroses. Heather tells him that Diana was sexually assaulted by their father, and denies giving her the gun. She reveals to him that she's unhappily married to a gangster, Jimmy Evans, whom she's afraid to leave under threat of retaliation. Isaac confesses that he finds her irresistible, and the two have sex. Afterwards, Heather divulges that her and Diana’s mother left after their father r*ped Diana. Subsequently, their father died in a fire, which police suspected Diana might have started. Heather defended her sister, who has since blocked the ordeal out of her memory.

During a public dinner with Jimmy, Heather induces an episode of "pathological intoxication" by drinking wine and is subsequently taken to the hospital. After recovering in the emergency room, she sneaks away with Isaac to an abandoned lighthouse near the Golden Gate Bridge. While climbing the stairs to a balcony, she accidentally drops her purse and lets loose a metal dumbbell handle, which she claims she keeps for protection.

Determined to help Heather leave her husband, Isaac asks his friend, defense attorney Mike O'Brien, to investigate Jimmy's illegal activities. Mike informs Isaac that Jimmy is under federal investigation for a myriad of financial crimes. He warns Isaac to stay away from the gangster’s wife, but the infatuated Isaac follows her and Jimmy to a restaurant. Claiming she feels ill, Heather leaves the restaurant early, and gets a ride home from Isaac. Later that night, she drinks cough medicine, which brings on another episode of pathological intoxication. As Jimmy forces a kiss on her, she grabs one of his metal dumbbells and uses it to knock him in the head. He falls into a filled bathtub and drowns.

Heather is arrested and held on suspicion of Jimmy's death. Isaac hires Mike to represent her, and enlists the help of an expert on pathological intoxication. The expert testifies in court that several of his patients have done harm to themselves or others in the throes of pathological intoxication. Due to the testimony and the absence of a murder weapon, Heather is found not responsible for Jimmy’s murder, due to temporary insanity. However, she is sentenced to confinement at to a psychiatric facility, where she will be released in four to six weeks, pending evaluation. Isaac serves as the head of psychiatry at Overland, and assures Heather she will be released as soon as possible.

During a symposium, Isaac overhears a colleague give a speech on one of Sigmund Freud patients who had persistent dreams of arranging flowers, the same dream Diana had described to him during an earlier session. Isaac realizes that Diana fabricated those stories. He confronts a courthouse guard who recognized Heather before her trial, and he recalls that she used to frequent the courthouse as a spectator, whenever Isaac testified on behalf of the insane. Mike tells Isaac that Jimmy's brother recently died, making Heather the beneficiary of Jimmy's $4 million life insurance policy. Isaac goes to the hospital to confront Heather, who admits to the ruse but threatens him not to cross her. She claims to have hidden the dumbbell she used to murder Jimmy, which is covered in Isaac’s fingerprints after he touched it at the lighthouse. Outside the hospital, police detective Huggins approaches Isaac, whom he suspects of murdering his lover’s husband in exchange for a cut of Jimmy’s life insurance policy. Isaac returns to the psychiatric hospital and tells Heather that he has reported her crime to two assistant district attorneys who want to interview her. She reminds him that double jeopardy prevents her from being tried twice, and agrees to the inquiry.

During the evaluation, Isaac observes as Heather gives a false report of the crime, blaming Isaac for killing her husband. At Heather’s request, Diana joins her, but fails to bring the dumbbell, which Heather planned to hand over as evidence of Isaac’s guilt. Heather screams at her sister, and further loses her temper when she discovers the interrogators are hospital psychiatrists, not prosecutors as Isaac said. She is sedated and dragged away by orderlies. Sometime later, Isaac meets Diana, who has changed her hair to look like Heather’s. She assures him that she dropped the incriminating dumbbell into the bay, but Isaac does not trust her. Isaac enlists Pepe Carrero, a former client, to follow Diana when she visits her sister.

Although Heather wants Diana to deliver the dumbbell to Detective Huggins, Diana is too nervous to go through with it. Heather coerces her to switch clothes in the bathroom, allowing Heather to escape the hospital as “Diana,” while Diana stays behind as an inmate. Pepe follows Heather, and tries to steal the dumbbell from her, but she retaliates by shooting him in the chest. She telephones Huggins and arranges to meet him at a marina. Isaac catches up to Pepe just as he is being taken away in an ambulance. Pepe directs him to the marina, where Isaac intervenes just as Heather passes off the dumbbell to Huggins. Isaac grabs the dumbbell, rendering his old fingerprints inadmissible. Heather takes the two hostages at gunpoint, and forces Huggins to drive away from the marina.

A rainstorm hits, and he crashes into the ocean. Isaac escapes the sinking car and Heather follows him to the abandoned lighthouse, situated nearby. As she chases Isaac onto the balcony, he deduces that Heather was the one who was r*ped by her father, not Diana, and she must have started the fire that killed him. Heather admonishes him for trying to “shrink” her. A portion of the balcony breaks off, causing Isaac to fall. Just then, Huggins appears. Heather points her gun at him, but Isaac reaches up from the dangling balcony and pulls her over the edge. She falls to her death, and Isaac scrambles back inside. Diana is tried as Heather’s accomplice, but is found not guilty. Sometime later, posing as Heather, she seduces a wealthy man, and pretends to have a condition that forbids her from drinking.