A Dangerous Method (2011)

A Dangerous Method dramatizes the volatile convergence of ideas, desire and rivalry at the birth of psychoanalysis. Set in the early 1900s, the film follows Carl Jung, a promising Zurich psychiatrist who applies Sigmund Freud’s new “talking cure” to a disturbed young patient, Sabina Spielrein. As Jung helps Sabina uncover the traumatic roots of her hysteria she awakens intellectually and emotionally; the patient–doctor relationship evolves into an illicit affair. Jung’s later personal and professional meetings with Freud build an intense mentor–protégé bond that fractures when Jung begins to depart from Freud’s insistence that sexuality is the sole engine of neurosis. Rival ideas, jealousies and secret passions ripple outward to affect Jung’s wife and colleagues, with one patient — and one idea — coming between the two men. If you watch this film you’ll experience a tightly wound, cerebral drama that balances clinical detachment with fierce emotional undercurrents. Expect patient therapy scenes and dream interpretations that feel clinical yet intimate, charged private encounters that complicate moral lines, and long, idea-driven conversations that turn into personal battles. The period detail and restrained visual style underscore the film’s analytical mood while close performances convey the characters’ obsessive impulses and guilt. The pacing is thoughtful and deliberate: less action than psychological tension, less spectacle than moral interrogation. The movie is compelling if you’re drawn to historical character studies, intellectual duels, ethical dilemmas in medicine, and stories about how personal longing can reshape a movement. It asks who owns an idea, how mentorship can become possession, and what happens when scientific ambition collides with human desire.

Actors: Michael Fassbender, Keira Knightley, Viggo Mortensen

Director: David Cronenberg

Runtime: 99 min

Genres: Biography, Drama, Romance

6.0 /10 76 /100 6.4 /10 6.7 /10