"Michael won the Venice award for Steve McQueen's Shame, but he could have easily taken the prize for his role as Carl Jung in 'A Dangerous Method'."

David Cronenberg's film version of Christopher Hampton's play The Talking Cure explores the early days of psychoanalysis through the relationship between Jung and Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), a Russian-Jewish patient who would go on to become a therapist and psychoanalytic theorist herself. Knightley's accent is so exaggerated that it works as an alienation effect, much as Ed Harris's stylized performance did in A History of Violence.

There has been a discussiom of what, by Cronenberg standards, seems like its relative conventionality, but it's hard to think of another movie so intent on imagining this particular moment. The period-piece stiffness and artifice are entirely deliberate—A Dangerous Method out to be a film in which Jung and Freud (Viggo Mortensen) compete to rationalize the irrational.

Psychoanalysis is a funny profession. Its doctors aren’t like cardiologists or gastroenterologists. Your heart is your heart, your intestines are your intestines, and so forth. Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, attempt to impose rationality on the irrationality of emotions. It works from a vague definition of “normal” and then tries to determine why a behavior deviates from that unspecified norm. Sigmund Freud believed it was not the place of psychoanalysts to simply point out the abnormality, while his protege Carl Jung thought that the practice was worthless if it couldn’t be advanced to help those in need. These two figures illustrate the clash of the ego, id, and super-ego in David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, a film which brilliantly explores Freudian concepts and how we wish to indulge our base emotions but instead build a wall of reason and science to imprison our desires.

From the outset, we see that science is personal for Jung. In an early scene, he does a polygraph test on his wife, not because he doesn’t trust her, but because he can’t stay emotionally distant from his research. The polygraph test hints how Jung will intimately pursue his “research” when he takes Spielrein as his mistress. Jung keeps their relationship secret and denies the rumors of it, but his super-ego keeps clawing at the door of his mind and he is torn between indulging his desires—a belief espoused by doctor/patient/total-id Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel)—and remaining faithful to his wife and upholding his rising career.

For his part, Freud understands the fragility of his new medical discipline and he keeps his emotional distance from almost everyone even though his catch-all answer to psychosis (it’s sexual) betrays his own repression. Freud believes he has a close friendship with Jung but it steadily becomes clear that Freud will not relinquish the direction of his discipline even though he declares Jung as his heir-apparent. These two men can never be colleagues nor can they truly disconnect. They are opposed yet work in concert and Cronenberg brilliantly crafts the ego/id/super-ego metaphor without even mentioning the concept to the audience.

Cronenbergian shock effects cut through the air of propriety. All of the director's films deal with the split between the mind and the body; A Dangerous Method merely explores that realm from a more cerebral angle. It's also, in more subtle ways, Cronenberg's most Jewish movie, with a punch line that makes the preceding debates about repression seem deeply irrelevant—or perhaps relevant in entirely different ways.

One of the strengths of the film and of Hampton’s script (and presumably his play before it) is that the film’s two distinct stories, Jung’s friendship with Freud and his painful romance with Spielrein, are fully complementary and each cleverly sheds light on the other. Michael won the Venice award for Steve McQueen's Shame, but he could have easily taken the prize for his role as Carl Jung in 'A Dangerous Method'.

By the time the film leaps forward for a final epilogue in 1934, you feel that Cronenberg and Hampton have succeeded in a full and telling this story.