First Look: ‘Hysteria’ Movie Trailer

This one’s purely for adult audiences… Hysteria, which will debut at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival, tells the hysterical true story of the invention of the vibrator.

The Plot: The time is the 1880s, at the very peak of Victorian prudishness but the dawn of the electrical age. In London, the brilliant and devoted young doctor Mortimer Granville (Hugh Dancy) has just lost his hospital position for believing in “germ theory” and needs a new job. He finds it with Dr. Dalrymple (Jonathan Pryce), who specializes in treating the alarming epidemic of women suffering from “hysteria” – the flustering symptoms include weeping, melancholia, and erratic, aggressive emotions unbefitting a proper lady.

Dalrymple’s “manual massage” cure is shockingly effective, but Mortimer has to fight off both numb hands and the fiery disapproval of Dalrymple’s vexing daughter, Charlotte (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a champion of poor women’s rights, as he begins to build his fledgling practice.

Then, just when he seems to be losing his physician’s touch, Mortimer’s forward-thinking friend Edmund (Rupert Everett) unveils the plans for his new electric-powered feather duster, which gives the doctor a compelling idea… the result will revitalize his medical practice, thrill his patients and upend his heart, as Charlotte begins to teach him more about how women really work – and what they actually want – than he ever bargained for.

The result is a witty, winning comedy that not only reveals how the vibrator became one of the first electrical appliances in history to earn a patent – but sends sparks flying between a cautious man and a liberated woman brought together by the wonders of friction.