Some biopics are destined to end up as educational supplements for teachers looking to engage students in a subject with a little more entertainment value than a lecture can provide. David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method at times almost seems to be playing directly to that market. This loose history of the evolution of the working relationship between two of the 20th century’s most prominent psychoanalysts — Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) –practically follows a Psych 101 syllabus: Freud’s obsessions with both relating all psychological issues back to sex; his rigid categorizations; Jung’s uncertainty about those simplistic assessments; Jung’s fascination with parapsychological phenomenon and the resulting battle for the heart of psychology as hard science or metaphysical theorizing.

At the heart, it’s about blood. With Cronenberg, it’s always about blood. No other director of his stature has built a career out of such a fascination with blood, and the other assorted slick bodily fluids that course through Cronenberg’s filmography. What makes him unique, and apart from the average gorehound, is his coldly clinical presentation of the warm organic matters that make up life, and the deeper truths he uses them, slyly, as an…