Melodrama, a mad profusion of professional lingo, and whips in the bedroom notwithstanding, A Dangerous Method is a spare, if not austere movie, Bressonian in its ellipticality and compression of time. The passage of months, even years, are often marked by an abruptly closed or opened door. Howard Shore’s score, poised between late Beethoven and early Wagner is discreetly expressive. What makes the form of the film as radical as its underlying subject—Freud’s concept of the unconscious—is the monkey wrench Cronenberg throws into the construction of two shots, three shots, and reverse-angle POVs (or shot/countershot sequences as they are customarily termed). In recent movies, Cronenberg has favored a somewhat wide-angle lens that flattens space, making the actor in the foreground seem disproportionately large in comparison to the actor in the background. Most directors who use wide-angle lenses try to cover this distortion through movement. Here, however, particularly in the “talking cure” scenes, Cronenberg employs the disproportion to reveal something about subjectivity: how one’s self-involvement can dwarf one’s perception and comprehension of the other, or vice versa. A Dangerous Method thereby becomes a tragic study of the absence of true reciprocity in human relations.