[6] The film focuses on Gustav Mahler's demand that Alma give up her own artistic efforts (composing songs) to live a more traditional life as a wife and mother, and on the stress this caused in their marriage.

"[4]: 1  Hilmes goes on to say "The list of contemporaries – husbands, lovers hangers-on, and satellites – who crossed paths with Alma Mahler-Werfel ... is long and reads like a 'Who's Who in the Twentieth Century'.

In a review for Boston.com, Ty Burr wrote: It's an over-stylized and overwrought affair, and intentionally so — any other approach probably wouldn't play fair to the music or these tempestuous lives...

As portrayed alarmingly and well by Barbara Romaner, the character's not a great beauty but a seductive, destructive life force whose sexuality bursts the constraints of her time.

[5] In a review for The Hollywood Reporter, Kirk Honeycutt wrote: Mahler on the Couch ... manages to pose a serious, intimate study in obsessive jealousy while, like a gaga celebrity hunter, bumping into just about everybody who's anybody in Viennese society circa 1910...

[7]In a review for the Boston Phoenix, Jeffrey Gantz commented on some of the discrepancies between the film and history, concluding: "Mahler on the Couch doesn't plumb any psychological depths.