Film Review: A Dangerous Method (15) (From The Northern Echo)

Film Review: A Dangerous Method (15)

4:29pm Thursday 16th February 2012 in Reviews By Steve Pratt

Rating: 3/5

OR the film in which Keira Knightley gets a good spanking from Michael Fassbender, although let me add hastily that it’s not a sequel to his sex addict drama Shame.

Check showtimes for A Dangerous Method (15)

I only mention the bottom line because if I tell you A Dangerous Method is an intellectual debate between Sigmund Freud and his protégé Carl Jung about the birth of psychoanalysis I can see your eyes glazing over already.

Director David Cronenberg swaps the exploding heads of Scanners for a different sort of mind trip, adapted by Christopher Hampton from his stage play The Talking Cure.

The year is 1904 and a hysterical Sabina Spielrein (Knightley) is seen being dragged kicking and screaming into hospital where Jung (Fassbender) decides to try out on her the newfangled treatment known as psychoanalysis, or the talking cure.

Through this, he gets to meet Freud (Viggo Mortensen) to swap ideas. In reality, their initial talk lasted 13 hours, happily shortened for a movie lasting a mere 100 minutes.

The pair don’t see eye to eye on treatment.

Jung thinks Freud’s theories about sex are too rigid, which perhaps explains why he decides it’s a good idea to indulge in some hanky-spanky with Sabina and never mind his pregnant wife.

Eventually Sabina goes to Freud for treatment and, by the end of the story, has become a doctor. Mostly, A Dangerous Method is just talk, some more talk – and Knightley doing strange things with her jaw which she juts out and swivels so alarmingly you’d swear it was computergenerated.

If there was an Oscar for best performance by a jaw, Knightley would get it.

Mortenson, who also did good work in Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises and A History Of Violence, makes a thoughtful cigar-smoking Freud and the very busy Fassbender is Jung at heart as Sigmund’s protégé.