Hysteria (2011)

Two physicians in Victorian London massage their female patients into paroxysms and call it medicine, and the device that eventually spares their wrists becomes the film's modest hero. Hysteria arrived in 2011 with a wink, a period wardrobe, and a director, Tanya Wexler, who keeps the enterprise brisk and polite. The comedy is gentle. The history is shakier than the film cares to admit, resting on Rachel Maines' 1999 thesis about the vibrator's clinical origins, a claim later contested by historians who found the evidence thinner than advertised. The movie does not linger on the footnotes.

What it does linger on is gender. Maggie Gyllenhaal's Charlotte runs a settlement house in the East End, argues with her father, and treats the era's medical men as the smug custodians of a diagnosis invented to manage inconvenient women. The film is genuinely interested in female sexual health, in the way a society medicalized pleasure and called the result illness. Her arrest and trial give the third act its pulpit, and Mortimer's courtroom speech about hysteria being too common to be a disease lands with the sincerity of a lecture delivered from a comfortable distance. The tone stays light enough that the sermonizing never fully takes over.

The cast is white, British, and exactly what a 2011 costume picture would assemble, with women placed firmly at the center. Class gets a passing nod through Charlotte's charity work and a grumble about profiteering, but the film's concerns are gender first and everything else a distant second. It is a pleasant, well-mannered provocation, and it knows it.