A DANGEROUS METHOD

As an avid book-lover, I garnered great satisfaction leaving David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method with the revolutionary thought: that would have been a better book. And in fact it was, first as Christopher Hampton’s 2002 play The Talking Cure, which in turn was based on the 1993 non-fiction novel A Most Dangerous Method: The story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein by John Kerr.

As a movie-goer, however, it was disappointing to accept that a director who managed to make car crashes sexy and subversive (Crash, 1996), an actor unafraid of nudity with a F**k Yeah! Michael Fassbender fan site dedicated to him, a tolerable performance from the normally pinch-faced Keira Knightley, and a generally hypnotic subject matter ranging over psychoanalysis, sexual ‘perversity’ and the burgeoning warfield of study surrounding it, all up managed to be so dull. So un-dangerous. Perhaps if there had been more madness to Cronenberg’s method? (AB) ***