FILM

UK/Germany/Canada/Switzerland 2011 100 mins Dir: David Cronenberg Starring: Keira Knightley, Viggo Mortensen, Michael Fassbender, Vincent Cassel, Sarah Gadon

Keira Knightley writhes, moans, howls and juts her already impressive jaw like, well, an actress who's just been told she won't be getting an Oscar despite doing mental illness and a funny foreign accent in the same scene. Those who are tempted to conclude that this OTT turn at the outset of David Cronenberg's atypical 'A Dangerous Method' merits a firm spanking with a leather strap will be delighted to find Michael Fassbender, contemporary cinema's Mr. Sexual Perversion, correcting Ms. Knightley vigorously later in the film.

Cronenberg tackling Freud and Jung conjures up the delicious prospect of the great master of body horror going to town on the unconscious mind in general and phallic symbolism in particular. What we actually get in Christopher Hampton's adaptation of his own play is a talky, inert and fatally tasteful drama in which the rival psychoanalysts sit around exchanging great gobbets of often barely digestible dialogue. "This rod," muses Freud (Mortensen) of one of Jung's (Fassbender) racy dreams. "Have you entertained the possibility that it might be the penis?" Whatever happened to 'show, don't tell'?

In thrall to the beardy Freud, the young, er, Jung takes a hands-on approach to the talking cure when "vile, filthy and corrupt" (her description) virginal medical student Sabina Spielrein (Knightly, gurning as though auditioning for the lead in 'The Exorcism of Emily Rose') turns up for her spanking therapy. Remarkably, he also finds time to sire several children with long-suffering Mrs Jung (Gadon) and tussle with his illustrious mentor, who, in something of a pot/kettle situation, he believes to be obsessed with sex. On paper, this should have been a dramatic firecracker. But somewhere in translation it became disappointingly flat and uninvolving. (Robin Askew)

Website www.sonyclassics.com/adangerousmethod/index.php

Opens: February 10

Copyright Robin Askew 2012