Keira Knightley did exhaustive homework, practiced making alarming, contorted faces in her bathroom mirror and then contacted director David Cronenberg.

"I wanted it to be as shocking as possible. ... I sort of came up with a couple of options and then got on Skype and went, 'All right, what do you fancy?' and he went, 'That one.' "

After all, her character Sabina Spielrein in "A Dangerous Method" was described as having a hysterical fit and being ravaged by tics. "There were no descriptions anywhere as to what the actual tics were," she said, not even in the original case notes of Carl Jung, who treated the young woman.

But the actress found some hints in Sabina's diary entries.

"She described herself like a demon or a dog, which wasn't in the script. I thought that's pretty huge, if that's the way you see yourself, and I thought it was quite important somewhere to reflect that."

Taking that kernel, along with the notion that Sabina may have desperately been trying to release pent-up emotion, she perfected the faces (her jaw jutting so far forward it seems off its hinges) she showed to Mr. Cronenberg. Their movie, which played to a sold-out crowd during the Three Rivers Film Festival, opens today at AMC-Loews at the Waterfront, Manor in Squirrel Hill and Destinta near Bridgeville.

"A Dangerous Method" premiered during the Venice Film Festival in September, stopped in Telluride and then headed for the Toronto International Film Festival. That is where Ms. Knightley talked about researching Sabina, co-stars Michael Fassbender as Carl Jung and Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud, and the inspiration she found in her character.

In 1904, Sabina was brought -- screaming, laughing, crying like a madwoman -- more than 1,000 miles to a Zurich psychiatric clinic and Jung. He would employ Freud's experimental psychoanalysis or "talking cure" to help her, and would later surrender to his sexual attraction to his onetime patient.