Film Review: A Dangerous Method

Director: David Cronenberg

For a long time, David Cronenberg was known for doing films that set out to shock people like Videodrome and Crash. He steps in to new territory with his historical look at the birth of psychoanalysis in the early 20th century. The film was adapted from a play called The Talking Cure which was also based on a non-fiction book by John Kerr.

Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) and Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen)

The film opens with Sabina Spielrein (over-acted to an uncomfortable level by Keira Knightley) suffering from a deeply distressing mental condition who is referred to Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender). Early on they deal with Sabina's mental condition in therapy sessions but Jung finds she is incredibly intelligent and has a natural gift for psychology. Carl Jung's work makes him more successful and he is pushed to contact Sigmund Freud (Calmly played by Viggo Mortensen) about his work so that the field of psychology can be pushed forward but disagree on the fundamentals.

Vincent Cassel is the real star turn within this film as he plays Otto Gross who is a psychiatrist who is suffering from schizophrenia and is the polar opposite of the reserved and middle class personas of Jung & Freud. He is under-used within the film and is a man who believes that no feeling or desire should ever be repressed if you are to stay healthy mentally, a practice he maintains himself. Knightley is guilty of trying to over-act too much in the early part of the film and her Russian accent only seems to be present when she is speaking slowly and calmly, as soon as her speech is quickened or she is shouting it disappears.

Sabina Spielrein and Carl Jung disagree

Many interesting aspects of the plot seem to be missed out and glossed over; Sabina seems to be suffering hugely from her mental condition but seems to recover incredibly quickly. It seemed unrealistic for this to happen. The biggest fault for me was the lack of depth and tension between Jung and Freud into their disagreements about their beliefs, they seem to just accept their differences and continue to work separately which for me just meant there wasn't much interest in the entire plot.

The film Carnage by Roman Polanski proved that long sections of dialogue with little actually happening on screen can still be fascinating but it's a trick that this film fails to pull off, there are long sequences of dialogue surrounding their work in psychoanalysis that just don't engross the watcher. Fassbender and Mortensen do nothing wrong within this film but the script just doesn't deliver on what it should. Some of the scenes shot in Vienna and Zurich by the lakes and rivers are absolutely beautiful but the rest of the film falls flat.

1/4 dawdling pace and uninteresting plot at times make this a miss.