“There are so many mysteries, so much further to go.”

Though it lacks the festering wounds and congenital malformations that mark the director’s earlier work, David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method is no less effective at making the viewer acutely aware of their own physical bodies and their inability to understand the functions of their subconscious minds. An involving, dialogue-heavy period drama with biopic elements, the film depicts the personal and professional relationships that develop between psychoanalysts Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen), and Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), teaching the audience the basics of their profession even as it sketches out their personal lives.

At first, the two men form an iron-sharpens-iron relationship, their ideas sparking fresh insights in one another as the newfangled field of psychoanalysis takes shape. Their eventual falling out is conventionally chalked up to Jung’s mystical beliefs and Freud’s reduction of every issue to the sex drive, however, Christopher Hampton’s screenplay (derived from his own play The Talking Cure as well as John Kerr’s non-fiction A Most Dangerous Method) suggests that it might have been Spielrein herself—first patient, then student, mistress, and colleague of Jung—who caused the rift.

Caught between two titans of the field—each using their very own lives and families as elements in their grand experiments—Spielrein is the picture’s central figure. It is Knightley’s uninhibited and erratic performance that offers a thematic counterpoint to the civil relations and clinically-minded theorizing of the men, and gives the film its bite. Indeed, as J. Hoberman suggests, Knightley’s wild antics recall Patty Duke’s portrayal of Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker (1962). Still, the film would fall short without its director, who smartly uses the thematically-appropriate concept of association to inform his sequencing, allowing the film to skip over years with a single cut.

If all A Dangerous Method amounts to is a master filmmaker staging an extended dialogue between historical figures whose work clearly informed his entire career, it’s still extremely absorbing and thought-provoking cinema.