‘A Dangerous Method‘ (2011) was supposed to be a very different film from what David Cronenberg accustomed to his viewers for over three decades. The master of bizarre and violent in many special ways films, the creator of the body horror genre, announced a film based on the biographies of the founders of psychoanalysis, a period film with costumes that recreated the atmosphere of the decade before the outbreak of World War I. When it was released on screens and met its audiences at festivals and in theaters, those were able to see that in many ways this film was not eccentric in Cronenberg‘s filmography. Many of his favorite themes and especially the devastating effects of technological advances on people can be found in this film, and behind the long dresses and three-piece suits, equally hot passions and equally terrifying dangers are hidden.
The film’s script is written by renowned British playwright, screenwriter and translator Christopher Hampton, who brought to screen his own theater play inspired by a documentary book describing the contents of Sabina Spielrein’s letters and personal documents, discovered in Switzerland in 1977, over half a century after her journey without return to the USSR. Sabina Spielrein’s entire life, career and death could be the subject of another formidable film, but ‘A Dangerous Method‘ focuses on the period between 1906 and 1912, when the young Jewish woman from Russia began as a patient of Carl Jung and later became his lover, as well as an expert in psychoanalysis. Carl Jung had successfully applied Freud’s method of dialogue therapy, a medical novelty at the time, to cure Sabina. When the two brilliant scholars met and got to know each other personally, a relationship began between them, characterized by mutual respect, but also by differences of opinion, a relationship (Freudian one might say) between master/father and disciple/son. What role did Sabina play? It is not a classic triangle but rather an emotional one. The relationship between Freud and Jung headed towards a clash, perhaps inevitable, of ideas and personalities, which influenced the entire evolution of psychoanalysis, a method of psychiatric treatment but also a significant school of thought of the 20th century.
It is probably David Cronenberg‘s most talkative film. The dialogues are based on documents or letters exchanged by the three characters, which are sometimes also read in an off-screen voice. The tough task for the film actors is to give life to such a type of text on the screen. Best, in my opinion, succeeded Viggo Mortensen, who created a Sigmund Freud at the peak of his fame, doing his best to impose himself as a leader and also impose his theories, but still gnawed by doubts and human weaknesses. I was a little disappointed with Michael Fassbender. I found his vision of Carl Jung lacking in enthusiasm. He conceived his role more as a docu-drama, attentive to details and not to feelings. Keira Knightley seemed to me to have exaggerated a bit in the early scenes (when she is just a young patient forcibly subjected to treatments), but I know too little about the external manifestations of schizophrenia to be sure of my judgment. Later in the film, she manages to convince and move. Vincent Cassel also appears in a small but important role, that of another psychologist-patient, Otto Gross, who will provide Carl Jung with the motivation for an act that today we see as a gross violation of medical ethics. It is possible that if the script had been written and the film had been made a few years later, the approach to the relationships between the young woman and the powerful men around her would have been presented in a different light. There is no shortage, later in the film, of extreme scenes, such as appear in many of Cronenberg‘s films when it comes to relationships between men and women, but the true cruelty of the bonds between the characters in this film is psychological.