THE names Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung are commonplace nowadays as the fathers of psychoanalysis.

Not so that of Sabina Spielrein, who in 1904 aged 19 was admitted to the Burgholzli mental hospital in Switzerland with symptoms of hysteria.

David Cronenberg’s film draws on multiple sources to tell the story of Freud, Jung and Sabina, whose lives interacted after Jung’s 1909 letter to Freud describing Sabina as “a challenging case”.

In time Sabina became the first woman to practice psychoanalysis. The Nazis executed her and her children in 1942.

It’s a beautiful film, reproducing the elegance of its time and social classes in Switzerland and Vienna. There is some question whether Jung, married with children, was Sabina’s first sexual partner.

Christopher Hampton’s screenplay bites the bullet and says that was the case, describing the affair with restrained frankness in a plot both direct and in some ways complex.

Michael Fassbender is excellent as Jung. Viggo Mortensen is even better as Freud. But the film undeniably belongs to Keira Knightley as Sabina, a performance clamouring for acknowledgement at peer-group awards, whether plumbing the deepest depths of emotional anguish, playing delightful relationship games or debating complex professional ideas.

Knightley’s delicate, lambent beauty dominates every shot she is in. And the beauty of her androgynous body makes firm praise for small cup sizes.

At Dendy, Greater Union, Hoyts