Movie Review A Dangerous Method

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2011 – Spoiler alerts In 1904 a young woman, Sabrina Spielrein (Kiera Knightley) was suffering from extreme hysteria. She was taken to the Burghaus Asylum in Geneva and treated by rising psychiatrist Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender). Jung not only cured her but set her on course to become a leading pioneer psychiatrist herself, but Jung became dangerously infatuated by his protégé, embarking on an affair with her, putting his own marriage at risk as well as his career. This, and his increasing interest in occultism, alienated him from the other leading psychiatrist of the age, Sigmund Freud (Viggo Morteson). The film explores the increasingly conflicting lives of the three founders of psychiatry and it is a beautifully filmed, sometimes quite talky movie, with some quite explicit sex scenes. Though Spielrein is the main character, it is Morteson’s performance that really makes the movie come alive. Closing captions reveal that Freud died in London in 1939 soon after he arrived there in after fleeing from Vienna to escape Nazi persecution, while Spielrein, training student psychiatrists in Russia, was captured and shot by the Nazis in 1942. Jung survived until 1961. An intriguing movie about some of the most important people in mental health research, and while many know the name of Freud and Jung, fewer will know who Spielrein was, or her importance to the field in her own right. Directed by David Cronenberg, and far removed from his surreal horror movie roots. The film is a Canadian-German co-production. Arthur Chappell