Director David Cronenberg is well-versed in making films that understand and reveal the darker impulses and inner lives of his characters, and has given us a peerless body of films concerned with matters of science and pseudo-science. Hardly surprising then that he should be drawn to direct this adaptation by writer Christopher Hampton of his own stage play, The Talking Cure, dealing with the beginnings of psychoanalysis. In the early 1900s, Carl Jung, an up-and-coming doctor at a Swiss clinic, decides to experiment on a young Russian patient, Sabina Spielrein, using Sigmund Freud's controversial new method. Spielrein arrives at the clinic a deeply disturbed woman, though clearly intelligent and herself interested in pursuing a career as an analyst. Jung's treatment of Spielrein, and the affair that this leads to, takes place alongside the development of his intense relationship with Freud, who sees Jung very much as his disciple and heir to the throne. As Jung wrestles with his own impulses and his growing desire to distance himself from Freud the father figure, a personal and ideological split seems inevitable. A Dangerous Method turns history into absorbing drama, and Jung, Freud and Spielrein are developed as fascinating, complex characters. The battle between order and desire, science and nature, rationalism and mysticism is compellingly drawn, and nowhere more so than in the masterful performances of Fassbender and Mortensen.

Sandra Hebron

One of Sight & Sound's 30 Festival recommendations - read more