Trance Review: Danny Boyle wants to hypnotize you

Dir. Danny Boyle
101 Minutes
Rated R

Danny Boyle first came onto my radar with his brilliant take on the zombie genre (or rather, "infected" genre) with 28 Days Later.  Ever since I've been sure to catch every movie he makes, and seeing his evolution has been remarkable (I'd say having the honor of directing the opening ceremony for the London Olympic Games is a true testament to how reliable he is).  So Trance is the latest film to follow Boyle's latest string of hits, including 127 Hours and the Academy Award-sweeping Slumdog Millionaire.  It follows an art auctioneer, Simon (James McAvoy), who teams up with some gangsters - led by a tough guy named Franck (Vincent Cassel) - to steal a painting.  The only problem is that after a blow to the head during the heist, Simon forgets where he hid the thing, and problems arise... After torturing Simon leads nowhere, Franck enlists the help of a hypnotherapist, Elizabeth Lamb (Rosario Dawson), to extract the memory from Simon's head and what follows is a web of intrigue, double-crossing, and a lot of confusion.


Being a fan of Danny Boyle, I was really hoping to love this movie.  His track record is amazing, and the cast and the plot of this one made it seem like a surefire home run.  Unfortunately, this might be among my least favorite of his pictures (which still is a cut above most of the crap that's released today).  The first third of the movie starts off great.  The heist at the beginning and the set-up with Rosario Dawson's character were really intriguing and had me going for a while, but as the run time went on, less and less made sense, on both plot and character levels.  The whole "inside your mind" hypnosis thing is a good idea, and generally I enjoy movies that challenge the audience and doesn't spell everything out, but here it got confusing to the point where I wasn't sure what the stakes were.  I didn't know who exactly to "root" for, and I kept watching and waiting for a line or something to make it all click together, but I just sat there mesmerized by the colors.  Maybe I'm just not smart or artistic enough to "get it," but overall I was disappointed.

This film has so many similarities to Christopher Nolan's Inception that it would be impossible to not compare the two, especially since I think Nolan's film does what Trance tried and failed to do. In Inception we're never quite sure when we are in reality or a dream, but there is an internal logic to the narrative.  In that film, Ellen Page's character is more or less a placeholder for the audience - as she learns about the world we do as well.  There are also clearly defined stakes involved even if we aren't sure of what we're watching (they need to extract an "idea" through inception, have a 'kicker' so they don't end up in limbo, etc.).  But in Trance the purposefully confusing elements get in the way of the story, instead of actually helping to tell it.  Plus, it's not as if it's dealing with really complex themes or anything; by the end of the film, it degenerates into more or less a b-movie noir plot, but told through overly complicated means.

I did however like the overall look and feel of the picture, and the kinetic style that's become a signature of Boyle's work is still here (plus we get another great soundtrack from Rick Smith).  The over-use of colors as motifs and odd camera angles definitely helped create this weird atmosphere that evoked old Dario Argento horror films, but again, the story just wasn't up-to-par with the director's best.  The script was co-written by his longtime collaborators John Hodge and Joe Ahearne, who actually previously made this story into a TV movie of the same title in 2001 (which I can not find a trace of anywhere online oddly).  I'm not sure if that version was any better or not, but Trance (2013) is almost like a puzzle that you had to solve where picture wasn't on the front of the box. It may take some time to "get it," and when you do, it may not even be something you like.

Rating: C+


BONUS: Related Internet Video

Here's Danny Boyle's interview with Empire about his film Trance and a bit on how it fits in with his experience directing the Olympic opening ceremony.