This was the most disappointing movie of the year for me. I'm a big fan of Jung and his work in psychology, I have read all his books, and I also like a couple of Cronenberg movies too, so you can imagine my expectations. I was expecting this movie to be about Jungian psychology, about the difference with Freudian psychology, and about their relationship with Sabina which was very intense. This movie turned out to be a generic romantic drama (very slow one) about a man and a woman. The fact that the characters were Jung and Sabina had no implications whatsoever. Actually the characters could have been...I don't know...Sean and Julie, whoever, and there wouldn't be any difference. This is because Jung wasn't portrayed or developed at all as the psychiatrist he was, nor was Sabina nor Freud. They were just regular people using those names. The characters were not developed, they were just interacting in this love affair in a very superficial way. The few moments of the movie where you can see Freud and Jung discussing psychology (talking about the libido, about Junguian concepts, etc) they are unexplained and they feel totally out of place, because the movie is not about that, it's just about the love affair between this man and this woman. Completely generic and shallow. Sabina's character disappears at one point, then she returns but they don't tell you what happened with her. You're watching a romantic movie and suddenly the girl disappears, the 2 men have a conversation that had nothing to do with anything and then Sabina returns (cured? who knows!). It's a mess. Now, about Keira Knightley, I think she's fantastic, but in this movie her performance was overacted and forced, you can tell at some points of the story she doesn't know if act crazy or normal. I think the actors were just as lost as I was, they didn't know what to do because the characters were not defined at all. They didn't know who they were portraying, I mean they sure knew who Jung and Freud are, but this characters were not them, they were just people who acted weird. So, the main failure: the script.
Review of A Dangerous Method
