A Dangerous Method (2011)

“Angels always speak German...”

I've been watching a lot of David Cronenberg films lately, something which stems from both an increasing admiration of the diversity and extraordinary quality of his work and their ease of availability, particularly as several of them have been available on Amazon Prime of late. Sadly, I've seen rather more of the later films which tend to be subtitled than the older, more stereotypically Cronenberg "body horror" films which Amazon Prime seems unable to subtitle although its rival Netflix seems to have no trouble subtitling everything. Still, this superb film can't be blamed for that, and is another example of Cronenberg's late career peak.I hope, with increasing desperation, that he hasn't retired.

Superficiall this is a typical late Cronenberg film in that the camerawork and mood feel like Cronenberg and, of course, Viggo Mortensen plays a prominent role. Yet this is anything but a typical sort of film for Cronenberg to helm, being an adaptation of a period stage play that eschews the visual in favour of psychology. In every sense.

This is a fascinating portrait of three figures in intellectual figures- the well-known figures of Sigmund Freud and Paul Jung and the less famous yet pivotal figure of Sabina Spielrein.The film deals with several themes which echo those of psychoanalysis- father figures, sexual repression and guilt, and a very Belle Epoch approach to kink and kink-shaming, but also such things as social class and the tension between a comfortable yet repressed bourgeois life and a Bohemian life of freedom without security. It's a fascinating film of ideas, in that sense reminiscent of Cronenberg's Cosmopolis, but also a film full of repressed passion.

The whole thing is anchored by the three central performances of Mortensen, Michael Fassbender and expecially Keira Knightley, whose performance is simly extraordinary. A splendid film.