A Dangerous Method

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93 min.

Directed by: 

David Cronenberg

Starring: 

Viggo Mortensen

Michael Fassbender

Keira Knightley

Vincent Kassel

Screenplay by: 

Christopher Hampton

Based on John Kerr’s book A Most Dangerous Method and Christopher Hampton’s play “The Talking Cure”

Rated 14A; Coarse Language, Sexual Content.

A Dangerous Method seems straight-laced and conventional by comparison with David Cronenberg’s earlier movies – a handsomely shot costume drama set in Zurich and Vienna on the eve of the First World War.

However, scrape a little beneath the surface and you quickly realise that the Canadian is back exploring very familiar themes – hysteria, disgust, sexual and professional jealousy. For all its formal restraint, the film is just as subversive and as disquieting as predecessors such as Crash and Naked Lunch.

The film boasts two assured performances from Michael Fassbender and Viggo Mortensen and a very brave one from Keira Knightley in her most challenging role to date.

Cronenberg’s subject is the birth of psychoanalysis. The film chronicles the friendship and rivalry between Carl Jung (Fassbender) and Sigmund Freud (Mortensen). The key character is Sabina Spielrein (Knightley), an 18-year-old Russian diagnosed with hysteria.

Spielrein is first seen being whisked away against her will to the sanatorium. She is writhing and twitching and looks like a vampire or witch being dragged to the stake. Jung tries Freud’s ‘talking cure’ on her. He discovers that she was abused by her father and that she is a masochist who takes extreme sexual pleasure in humiliation.

Vincent Cassel has a small but colourful role as Otto Gross, a fellow psychiatrist who is sick himself. Gross is gleefully amoral. ‘Never repress anything’ is his motto. Partly under his influence, Jung – who is growing increasingly distant from his pregnant wife – begins a sado-masochistic affair with Sabina.

Films featuring well-known historical figures can often seem arch and self-conscious in the extreme. Here, Mortensen has such immediate authority and swagger as Freud that we don’t question his portrayal.

He is a sardonic and witty cigar-chewing patriarch, encouraging but also gently mocking Jung, whom he sees initially as a protegé. Fassbender skilfully conveys Jung’s inner doubts, his growing mysticism, his lust and his love for Sabina without ever showing any overt emotions at all.

Knightley has the most difficult role, playing a woman who is extremely highly strung. Her performance is courageous and moving.

Cronenberg’s achievement is to have made ‘an action movie with ideas’. The film may be very heavy on talk indeed but when the dialogue is as sharp and double edged as it is here, that is not a problem.

- Geoffrey Macnab, The Independent