I can’t think of another director that successfully mixes the tactile and the intellectual more often than David Cronenberg. In his very best films–for me, that means Dead Ringers, eXistenZ and The History of Violence–there’s a remarkable thematic balance between the two which in turn exposes the inevitable connections between the mental and the physical, the twining so tight that one becomes almost indiscernible from the other. It’s not only his key strength as a filmmaker; his work is almost entirely dependent on it. When imbalance creeps in, his films start to falter. Crash, his controversial 1996 adaption of J.G. Ballard’s novel, is almost entirely about the tactile, the film’s emptiness eventually becoming wholly dispiriting and, the most damning and unexpected complaint that can be leveled against a Cronenberg film, deadly dull. With A Dangerous Method, there’s finally a glimpse at what it looks like when it’s the intellectual that completely takes over, and the results are nearly as dire.

The film is about the evolution of the professional relationship between Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud at the point when the latter’s revolutionary theories were first starting to take hold. It also concerns itself with Jung’s connection to Sabina Spielrein, first as one of his patients and then in a far more intimate way. This should all be right in Cronenberg’s wheelhouse, but his approach to the material (adapted by Christopher Hampton from his stage play The Talking Cure) is overly sedate and, by extension, unduly chilly. These are people grappling with the very conflict that defines much of Cronenberg’s oeuvre. This should come across as the Master’s Thesis of his whole career. Instead, even the occasional introduction of true kinkiness holds no impact. It’s perfunctory when it should generate the dueling emotions of revulsion and allure.

Cronenberg can’t even quite get his actors on even footing. Michael Fassbender acquits himself nicely as Jung, but Viggo Mortensen doesn’t convince in the slightest as Freud, lacking any gravity, intellectual heft or even sense of existing in a different time. He sports and beard and chomps on cigars, but comes across a guy playacting rather than an actor delving into a complex role. As Spielrein, Keira Knightley certainly gives it her all, but she may have benefited from a director inclined to suggest that she dial it back to about eighty percent instead. Even after she progresses past the wild contortions of the early scenes, when her psychological issues manifest as brutal physical spasms, the performance is more exhausting than illuminating. It’s maybe a mark of the sadly staid nature of A Dangerous Method that even Knightley’s dash of tight abandon can’t enliven it. Cronenberg has long been a filmmaker defined by his contradictions, but who could have expected him to make a passionless film about passion?