Keira Knightley and Michael Fassbender star in A Dangerous Method. (eOne Films)

With Meryl Streep stirring up trouble with her portrayal of Margaret Thatcher, the drama A Dangerous Method would seem something a little safer, free from the complaints of colleagues. It focuses on two titans of psychoanalysis and takes place in Europe at the dawn of the 20th century, as the admiring Carl Jung reaches out to Sigmund Freud.

The near-omnipresent Michael Fassbender plays Jung as a buttoned-down, curious mind. Perhaps it's the residual images from Shame kicking around in my head, but I found his Jung surprisingly repressed.

If it's anyone's show, it's Viggo Mortensen's. As the cigar-puffing Freud, he stepped in at the last moment to portray the neurologist with sex on the brain. Mortensen has the age and the gravitas to sink into the role, embracing Freud's obsessions and concerns about his place in history.

Viggo Mortensen stars as Sigmund Freud in A Dangerous Method. (eOne Films)

The surprise is that this movie, filled with elegant dinners and drawing room debates, is directed by David Cronenberg. Those looking for pulsing orifices or evils twins will be disappointed by the director's cerebral, strictly controlled style this time around. A Dangerous Method is a movie where passionate discussions occur between pen pals. What little drama there is takes place as men lounge on yachts and through furious bouts of letter-writing.

The film, based on an earlier play and book about the two psychoanalysis icons, certainly shows its roots. Stiff and stilted are not adjectives usually applied to Cronenberg -- well, the first perhaps, but for different reasons.

For passion and danger, Keira Knightley comes to the audience's rescue as Sabina Spielrein, the Russian patient who tempts Jung and slides between him and his wife (played by rising Canadian star Sarah Gadon). Cronenberg has hailed Knightley as underrated and, watching her contort herself as a woman in the throes of what was then branded hysteria, it's easy to see why.

But, in such a hermetic, sealed-in production, Spielrein's spasms seem wildly out of proportion. Luckily, she eventually becomes a colleague of sorts, sharing her theories on sex with Freud as he puffs away on his cigar (insert your own analysis here).

No director should be ever placed in a box, so while it's great to see Cronenberg continue to stretch as a filmmaker, A Dangerous Method is a difficult film to recommend to any but most ardent fan of mental mind games.

RATING: 2.5 out of 5