A Dangerous Method | Film review

At Toronto, critics chided David Cronenberg’s treatise on the birth of psychoanalysis for its relative conventionality, but as always with this director, the truth lies beneath the surface. A mad-scientist tale disguised as an awards-bait prestige drama, A Dangerous Method examines what happens when proper, uptight Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) mingles with Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), a Russian Jew who begins as Jung’s patient and soon becomes his assistant. Seducing the doctor with her intellect and beauty, Spielrein is an unstable variable in a society that Cronenberg depicts as aggressively rigid and posed. (Even the art direction has a stilted quality: When Jung makes a trip to America, New York has a pointedly fake-looking skyline.) Knightley’s outrageous Russian accent instantly marks her as out of place; her deliberately exaggerated performance is as much an alienation effect as Ed Harris’s taunts in A History of Violence.

The subject is sexual repression, but—especially given the note the movie ends on—it’s clear A Dangerous Method is at least as interested in assimilation and anti-Semitism. Freud (Viggo Mortensen, chomping a cigar with relish) is keenly aware of the fact that religious discrimination means his research will come under extra scrutiny and must be seen as beyond reproach. Meanwhile, the more superficially grounded Jung clings to superstitions and mysticism. In one sense, A Dangerous Method is a stealth comedy about the absurdity of attempting to rationalize the irrational. In another, it’s a deadly serious drama about trust and the dangers of other people.