Appropriately for a film about the 'talking cure', A Dangerous Method has a lot of talking in it, but that doesn't make it any less absorbing. Psychoanalysis interests me, and Cronenberg's take on Freud (Viggo Mortensen aka Aragorn - v.g.), Jung (this Fassbender that everyone has been talking about lately) and Jung's patient (and later colleague) Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley, effective in a role that calls for the manneredness that comes so naturally to her) - on their characters and interactions - is apt, somehow at once opaque and revealing. The script assumes a working knowledge of many of the key psychoanalytic concepts, but the film is just as interested in the human psyche itself - in the ways that identity and selfhood are formed and made visible - as in the establishment of the field and the men (and, in Sabina, at least one woman) who were responsible for it. Not a warm film or an easy one, but rewarding.
(w/ Steph N, Alice, Andreas)
(w/ Steph N, Alice, Andreas)
