Rating: 2/5
Cult Movie Challenge 2016 | 26/52 | Cronenberg
Burghölzli Clinic, Zürich, Switzerland, 17 August 1904
Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) suffers a mental breakdown following the death of her only sister, Emilia. After one unsuccessful stay at a Swiss sanatorium, her family admits Sabina to Burghölzli.
Eugen Bleuler (André Hennicke) serves as director of Burghölzli, with Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) operating as an assistant to Bleuler. Jung starts talk therapy with Spielrein, using word association and dream interpretation.
Jung freely discusses his cases with his wife, Emma (Sarah Gadon). She determines Spielrein is the perfect guinea pig for Sigmund Freud’s (Viggo Mortensen) talk therapy that Jung intended to work out, despite Freud having no formal method written out.
Jung asks the troubled and suffering Spielrein to serve as his “assistant.” Spielrein has a preternatural gift for therapy, and Spielrein sees her as a kindred spirit.
Jung meets Freud to present his observations so each may debate their established philosophies like a 101 textbook. Jung tries to get Freud to renounce the notion that all neurosis originates in adolescent sexual experiences. It is ironic since he decides that everything Spielrein suffers from stems from her father beating her, turning her on as a child.
Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel) also shows up because Jung needs an exterior motivator to have sex with Spielrein.
If I've learned one thing in my short life, it's this: never repress anything.
Keira Knightley makes some incomprehensible acting choices — not bad, just bizarre. Everyone else plays perfectly flat affects with regionally appropriate accents.
David Cronenberg has been vocally anti-therapy for most of his career, considering himself above the need for it. I love some of Cronenberg’s movies, but when he moves too far from his delusional world, Cronenberg fumbles more than succeeds.
Here, he proves himself capable of such austere restraint that no perspective or personality makes it into Christopher Hampton’s bland, overwritten script.