Directed by David Cronenberg. Starring Viggo Mortensen, Michael Fassbender, Keira Knightley, Vincent Cassel, Sarah Gadon 16 cert, general release, 99 min
A powerhouse cast bolsters this unusual, cerebral drama from David Cronenberg, writes TARA BRADY
AT THE TURN-of-the-century, Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), a young Russian Jewish emigre, arrives shrieking into Carl Jung’s Burgholzli Clinic in Zurich. The pioneering Jung (Michael Fassbender) has recently embraced Sigmund Freud’s radical “talking cure” method and immediately gets to work on his new patient’s twin obsessions with masturbation and defecation.
The hip new methodology works. By the time Jung consults with Viggo Mortensen’s twinkling, cunning Freud, Sabina’s hysterics are noticeably diminished. But the father of psychoanalysis has a job for the young go-getter: Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel), an artist turned psychoanalyst, is coming to stay. Gross, a fiendish walking Freudian id with an early patent on the porking cure, has an immediate corrosive effect on Jung’s impeccably mustachioed Protestant reserve.
Gross sees only that Sabina, the soon to be an influential early psychoanalyst, is an old-fashioned girl who wants to be spanked by “daddy” and that Dr Jung is conveniently played by – no better man – Michael Fassbender.
On paper, Christopher Hampton's screenplay – his liveliest since Dangerous Liaisons– is an odd choice for director David Cronenberg. Psychoanalysis went out with disco: who on earth still cares about the petty squabbles of Freud and Jung?
In practice, A Dangerous Methodhas far more to say about sex and society than Shame, its accidental counterpoint. Cronenberg marshals his cast into a series of perfect love triangles and Freudian tripartites: Jung wavers between Freudian ethics and Grossian, well, grossness; he wavers between his dull, fragrant wife (Sarah Gadon) and feral Sabina. Knightley, in turn, shifts her intellectual loyalties from Jung to Freud.
Shot in clean, neat tableaux, the film's form slyly apes its premise. You'd never guess what goes on under those bustles, and you might not spot just how Cronenbergian these old-timers are. Between Freud and Jung's Oedipal handbags and Gross and Spielrein's primal charms, A Dangerous Methoddoubles as a mute play for Cronenberg's entire oeuvre.
A killer cast helps. Knightley, replete with an odd, trembling accent, bravely ventures into full historic hysteria. Christophe Waltz had been penciled in to play Freud, but Mortensen proves the better bet. His Sigmund is nuanced and dryly hilarious, a quick foil for Fassbender’s earnest, deluded Jung.
It’s another fallen-angel masterclass from Fass, but this time the sex is a noisy, messy release.
