A Dangerous Method can be seen as a reprise of Dead Ringers, which represents Cronenberg's transition from genre-film director with art-film leanings to art-film director with genre-film leanings. Loosely based on a true story, it stars Jeremy Irons as identical twin gynecologists who share work and women. When the subordinate twin falls for an infertile actress, the twins' already fragile equilibrium is irreparably disrupted. They spiral into co-dependency, drug abuse, paranoid delusions about "mutant women" and murder/suicide.

Since Dead Ringers, Cronenberg has employed fantastic elements in his films, such as the drug-induced hallucinations of talking cockroach-typewriters in Naked Lunch (1991) and the living video game consoles in eXistenZ (1999), but he's also moved towards what might be called psychological drama, with the strangeness emerging from the characters' flawed perceptions. Naked Lunch, M. Butterfly (1993) and Spider (2002) all feature men who prefer their own fantasies because they find living in reality intolerable.

Whereas his middle-period films ended with anarchy, exile and suicide, his later films have a slightly less pessimistic view: that an orderly life is possible, but it will always be punctuated by eruptions of chaos.

His gangster duology of A History of Violence (2005) and Eastern Promises (2007) contains no fantastic elements, but includes the same concerns of transformation and alienation. A Russian Mafia tattoo needle kit is a device of metamorphosis as potent as the telepods of The Fly, turning men into insects.

It would be a mistake to see Cronenberg's post-2000 films as an ashamed retreat from his grindhouse roots in science fiction and horror to more socially acceptable, highbrow genres like crime thriller and period costume stories. They have the same driving concerns: order collapsing into chaos, the flawed, divided man fragmenting, the desperate longing that can never be satisfied. These are explored in a less fantastic tone, but the weirdness is still there, lurking beneath the respectable trappings. No Merchant Ivory feature ever ended with Jeremy Irons committing suicide in kabuki makeup.

This raises the question of where Cronenberg fits in the culture today. The cinematic landscape has changed considerably over his career, even as he has moved through it. The rise of the "torture porn" genre, which Cronenberg foreshadowed in his Videodrome (1982), means there's an entire segment of the moving images industry built on shocking the bourgeoisie (and apparently some of the bourgeoisie lap it up).

However, Cronenberg has never been into shock for its own sake. Even in his earlier, more aggressive films, there was an intellectual aspect that went well beyond mere shock value. He employed a scalpel, not a cudgel, but he still wanted to make a lasting, almost physical impression on the viewer, to break through prejudices and defences.

Today, can Cronenberg still provoke us, or rather, does he still want to provoke us? The answer, it seems from A Dangerous Method, is no. There just isn't anything in the film that will push anybody outside their comfort zone. Some viewers will take it as just another corsets-and-Homburgs historical film.

This is not to say that Cronenberg should drop the costume drama and start shooting Canada's answer to The Human Centipede. In interviews, he has consistently argued that artists should be allowed creative freedom without the demands of commercial success or state control or critical approval. He has the right to make whatever kind of film he likes, even a sequel to his little-discussed drag racing melodrama, Fast Company (1979).

Yet, something has been lost. There's certainly no shortage of shocking movies out there, but how many of them get under the viewers' skin, or inspire the critical uproar of Dead Ringers or Crash? Cronenberg's unique position in the film world, one foot in Fangoria and the other in Cahiers du Cinema, allowed him to create a distinctive series of films, almost his own genre. The adjective "Cronenbergian" is rarely applied to anybody else's work.

To risk the critical faux pas of using the art to psychoanalyse the artist, A Dangerous Method could be read as Cronenberg questioning his own career in film. Is he like Freud, the rebel turned keeper of the new orthodoxy, or is he like Jung, the pioneer who needs to break from his own tradition to advance? Is it enough to show people their own sickness, or should he show people a way to be whole?

Cronenberg in his sixties now, and maturity brings changes in outlook. If he continues down the path of restraint, or just decides to retire, will anyone take his place as provocateur?

Provocation tends to be a young person's game. Maybe somewhere out there is a Jung to Cronenberg's Freud, some videographer toiling away in a low-culture media job, making commercials or reality TV or even torture porn. He or she is cursed with the same kind of dark and twisted curiosity, just waiting for the right circumstances to get that unique vision out into the world. This person will not be "the new Cronenberg," but will do the same thing: emerge from a despised genre and transcend it, to show us something we have never seen before, that will challenge us to call it horrifying or beautiful.

[Tags: Film.]