On the surface it would seem that David Cronenberg has taken another radical departure from his trademark body-horror preoccupations with A Dangerous Method. It’s a film whose refined, prim, costumed appearance would suggest a Merchant-Ivory bodice-ripper more than something by the Canadian auteur of such heady provocations as Videodrome and Crash. But in essence this period piece, scripted by Christopher Hampton from his play The Talking Cure, remains the same economical, exacting, austere Cronenberg we’ve always known. Whereas in the past his depictions of violence were expressed in grotesque external ruptures of the physical form, here it’s confined to the turbulence of repressed sexuality and the ideological friction that occurs when the two founding fathers of psychoanalysis come head-to-head. A Dangerous Method is probably Cronenberg’s talkiest effort, with most of the film developing around two-person conversations. But the talk contains a cerebral charge, often stimulating, sometimes dryly funny and never boring, whether it’s centered on Karl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and his liaisons with Russian patient/mistress/analyst-to-be Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), or Jung’s back-and-forth discussions with Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen), whose criticism of the former’s “second-rate mysticism” drives a wedge between them. While Fassbender and Mortensen are both uniformly in check, the same can’t be said for Knightley’s bug-eyed, teeth-baring, overzealous performance, particularly in the first reel.