A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg, 2011)

You can take the man out of body horror but you can't take body horror out of the man, even if here Cronenberg has disguised his singular preoccupation by wrapping it inside human psychology instead. Ostensibly we're watching the story of the relationship between Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud and the birth of modern psychoanalysis, but any such agendas are subsumed by the illicit affair Jung has through the story with one of his patients who happens to be a masochistic nympho. The habitually formidable Michael Fassbender as Jung cuts a tepid figure, Viggo Mortensen does Freud as a caricature and though one may not expect much of Keira Knightley, she manages to outdo the irritation quotient of any of her previous roles with her gurning Russian headcase. Peppered with split focus in every second close-up to self-neutralising effect, this is Cronenberg's poorest drama by some distance, and in fact inferior to his jerry-built '70s horror B-movies, which at least did not take themselves seriously.

4/10