Trance (2013)
Directed by Danny Boyle
A violent gang enlists the help of a hypnotherapist in an attempt to locate a painting which somehow vanished in the middle of a heist.
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A sleek, modern update of such equally improbable hypno-noirs of the past as Alfred Hitchcock's "Spellbound" (1945) and Otto Preminger's "Whirlpool" (1949), "Trance" also is a puzzle film, in the relatively new tradition of "The Usual Suspects," "Memento," " Shutter Island " and " Inception ."
In terms of its psychiatry-related plot one could compare “Trance” to “Spellbound,” but Hitchcock’s film, while highly inventive for its time, is a model of stylistic restraint next to Boyle’s, which ramps up the director’s customary visual acrobatics to new heights.
Boyle evokes the ghost of Hitchcock with the character of Elizabeth, who immediately recalls Ingrid Bergman’s cool-headed shrink in Spellbound , but this character is almost like an inverse of that one — the more we know about her, the less interesting she gets.
The main body, however, is closer to Alfred Hitchcock’s problematic 1945 picture Spellbound .
Trance will certainly evoke comparison to Christopher Nolan’s Memento , since both deal with amnesia and revenge, and even with Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the mother of all psychological murder mysteries, and one that, like Boyle’s, depends on distortions and deceptions both real and imagined.
But as in Christopher Nolan's "Inception," the wrinkles between reality and illusion soon become irritating.
A sleek, modern update of such equally improbable hypno-noirs of the past as Alfred Hitchcock's "Spellbound" (1945) and Otto Preminger's "Whirlpool" (1949), "Trance" also is a puzzle film, in the relatively new tradition of "The Usual Suspects," "Memento," " Shutter Island " and " Inception ."
This isn’t “Inception,” where layers of experience are nested neatly one inside the next, but rather a frittata, its ingredients distinguishable only by the various hyper-saturated colors that seem to define each scene.
Nevertheless, the mounds of cash Inception raked in have mattered—recently we've had The Adjustment Bureau, Looper, and now Danny Boyle's Trance cooking our noodles al dente.
Director Danny Boyle is clearly trying to make his “Inception,” but instead he’s made his “Vanilla Sky.” It’s a lackluster thriller that steals just about all of its ideas from either “Inception” or “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.”
Oh, this is a stylish enough, mind-bending thriller, a cocktail of "Inception," "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," and "The Thomas Crown Affair" (the remake).
A sleek, modern update of such equally improbable hypno-noirs of the past as Alfred Hitchcock's "Spellbound" (1945) and Otto Preminger's "Whirlpool" (1949), "Trance" also is a puzzle film, in the relatively new tradition of "The Usual Suspects," "Memento," " Shutter Island " and " Inception ."
Nolan, responsible for such twisty gems as Inception, Memento and The Prestige, would probably have to be suffering from some sort of wooziness to concoct a script like the one Boyle uses here.
“Trance” also shares more than a few things in common with Nolan’s best work, the gloriously disorienting “Memento.”
Fans of the meta and Moebius-strip narrative styles of "Inception" and "Memento" should have a blast.
Trance will certainly evoke comparison to Christopher Nolan’s Memento , since both deal with amnesia and revenge, and even with Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the mother of all psychological murder mysteries, and one that, like Boyle’s, depends on distortions and deceptions both real and imagined.
Essentially a riff on the post-Memento puzzle, the film hums along, buoyed by Dawson’s sultry intelligence and Cassel’s sleazy charisma.
Nolan, responsible for such twisty gems as Inception, Memento and The Prestige, would probably have to be suffering from some sort of wooziness to concoct a script like the one Boyle uses here.
Nothing is what it seems or appears to be, and Boyle and Dod Mantle are influenced by another remarkable movie involving hypnosis and fleetingly recalled dreams: John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate .
It brings to mind similar head-benders "Inception" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," but unfortunately doesn't live up to the comparison.
Oh, this is a stylish enough, mind-bending thriller, a cocktail of "Inception," "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," and "The Thomas Crown Affair" (the remake).
Smash together “Inception,” “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “The Thomas Crown Affair” with director Danny Boyle's (“Slumdog Millionaire”) typically pulsing style, and what do you get?
Trance also shares with Memento and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind a fascination with memory and its importance to human beings.
But if you can buy into hypnosis essentially as mind control, then there’s a lot to enjoy in this twisty combination of Inception and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind—especially before the characters bring things down by explaining it all.
It seems to be aiming in the direction of Inception, with a jot of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Ocean's Eleven.
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Trance is high-order, film noir nonsense that takes Boyle back to the thrillers he made at the start of his career with John Hodge (he wrote Trance, too), like Shallow Grave and Trainspotting, that were preoccupied with the grimy corners of the psyche.
What “ Trance ” is really about, though, is bravura filmmaking: The director is Danny Boyle , who made “ Trainspotting ” and “ Slumdog Millionaire .”
Scripters Joe Ahearne (a BBC -TV veteran) and John Lodge (who worked on Boyle's excellent early films, "Shallow Grave" and "Trainspotting") have given the story more twists and turns and double crosses than a Boy Scout manual of knots, and untangling them becomes a bit of a chore.
Though beguiling, it doesn't have the dark wit of Boyle's mysterious Shallow Grave or the pulsating suspense of Trainspotting, his harrowing portrait of drug addiction.
Boyle's work has always had a too-much-coffee energy, a distaste for good taste and a wild willingness to mix and match styles within movies, sometimes even within scenes; he's at his best when the material (drug addiction in "Trainspotting," the hiker's hallucinations in "127 Hours") frees him from the surly bounds of logic.
Back in the day, all it took was a bit of muscle and some nerve to rob art from auction, Simon explains in a stretch of Scottish-lilted, direct-address narration that not only recalls Hodge’s earlier scripts (“Shallow Grave,” “Trainspotting”), but suggests a younger, softer-edged Ewan McGregor.
Trance is high-order, film noir nonsense that takes Boyle back to the thrillers he made at the start of his career with John Hodge (he wrote Trance, too), like Shallow Grave and Trainspotting, that were preoccupied with the grimy corners of the psyche.
This one shares DNA and one of its cowriters with "Shallow Grave" but its style is current Boyle, as defined by the stunning work of now constant collaborator cinematographer Anthony Todd Mantle.
Scripters Joe Ahearne (a BBC -TV veteran) and John Lodge (who worked on Boyle's excellent early films, "Shallow Grave" and "Trainspotting") have given the story more twists and turns and double crosses than a Boy Scout manual of knots, and untangling them becomes a bit of a chore.
Though beguiling, it doesn't have the dark wit of Boyle's mysterious Shallow Grave or the pulsating suspense of Trainspotting, his harrowing portrait of drug addiction.
This is Boyle from an excellent vintage: his first feature, the delicious dark comedy Shallow Grave (1994) plays the same game of whom do you trust?
Back in the day, all it took was a bit of muscle and some nerve to rob art from auction, Simon explains in a stretch of Scottish-lilted, direct-address narration that not only recalls Hodge’s earlier scripts (“Shallow Grave,” “Trainspotting”), but suggests a younger, softer-edged Ewan McGregor.
As Boyle demonstrated with his previous feature film, these techniques can transform even the story of a man pinned between rocks for " 127 Hours " into a psychedelic delirium.
His last two films, Slumdog Millionaire and 127 Hours, were among his best: gorgeous to look at and thoroughly absorbing.
Boyle's work has always had a too-much-coffee energy, a distaste for good taste and a wild willingness to mix and match styles within movies, sometimes even within scenes; he's at his best when the material (drug addiction in "Trainspotting," the hiker's hallucinations in "127 Hours") frees him from the surly bounds of logic.
After painting himself out of a physical corner with “127 Hours,” the director now confronts a psychic obstacle in attempting to tell a complex genre movie from within the confines of one person’s consciousness — even as others noodle with the same character’s subconscious.
This assault-of-the-senses intro reassures the viewer that yes, we have entered the realm of 127 Hours director Danny Boyle, who is again aggressive in displaying his restless talents, incorporating black-and-white photography, canted angles, throbbing electronica, and fourth-wall breakage.
(His main accomplice in the visual realm, as in "Slumdog Millionaire" and "127 Hours," is the cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle.
It was directed by Oscar winner Danny Boyle (“Slumdog Millionaire”), who confirms that he is incapable of making a bland movie but susceptible to picking a preposterous script.
What “ Trance ” is really about, though, is bravura filmmaking: The director is Danny Boyle , who made “ Trainspotting ” and “ Slumdog Millionaire .”
His last two films, Slumdog Millionaire and 127 Hours, were among his best: gorgeous to look at and thoroughly absorbing.
Flitting back and forth between present-day scenes and memories, Boyle and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (their many films together include Slumdog Millionaire) create a sleek, almost photorealist London, with flashbacks and memories so sharp and bright it's deliberately hard to know what's real and what's not.
Moviegoers who expect a rote movie from British director Danny Boyle (“28 Days Later,” “Slumdog Millionaire”) will have the rug yanked from under them.
With its sometimes stroboscopic editing and the strenuous cinematography of Anthony Dod Mantle (who won an Oscar for Boyle’s “Slumdog Millionaire”), “Trance” is hypnotic without being in any way somnolent.
Usually, though, the plot rationalization for the woozy subjectivity of his cinematography is more universal, and easier to accept: drugs in Trainspotting; madness in Shallow Grave, The Beach, and 28 Days Later; the outsized imagination of childhood in Millions; extreme physical privation in 127 Hours; and so forth.
Within little more than the last decade, an apocalyptic zombie movie (2003's " 28 Days Later ") was followed by an innovative family fable (2005's " Millions "), then an outer space-set sci-fi/thriller (2007's " Sunshine ").
Prone to delivering grit, even with family fare like “Millions,” his newest opus is something of a surreal and mind bending thriller that constantly shifts between plains of consciousness and vision that often fools the viewer in to trying to figure out what’s reality and what’s pure dream.
An art-world adventure like no other (think The Thomas Crown Affair in a pressure cooker with a strobe light), Trance gives Boyle yet another canvas on which he can paint, the hypnosis scenes stepping in for a child's imaginings in Millions , or a hiker's delusions in 127 Hours , as that which takes the reins off of logic and breaks the bonds of stylistic restraint.
The inimitable director Danny Boyle ( Slumdog Millionaire , Millions ) has made the most of his immense skills as a filmmaker in this bold and multidimensional film that shifts gears and roars into our consciousness as a heist flick; a psychological thriller about loss of memory and the powers of hypnotism; and a provocative parable about human desire, greed, sexuality, paranoia, and betrayal.
Boyle has cited Nicolas Roeg as an influence on the film’s disorienting style, and sure enough, “Trance” shares the jagged subjectivity of “Performance” and “Don’t Look Now,” along with the director’s raw treatment of anger and arousal.
Boyle has mentioned his admiration for Nicholas Roeg's thriller Don't Look Now, a chilling drama that is at once exotic and deeply mysterious.
Boyle has cited Nicolas Roeg as an influence on the film’s disorienting style, and sure enough, “Trance” shares the jagged subjectivity of “Performance” and “Don’t Look Now,” along with the director’s raw treatment of anger and arousal.
(One of the routes he takes at her suggestion looks like an ecstatic version of Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg driving through the French countryside in "Breathless.")
Though the actress hasn’t done much of note since her debut in Larry Clark’s polarizing teen drama “Kids,” she delivers her best work yet with an outstanding performance as the movie’s femme fatale.
From her debut in Kids through Sin City and Unstoppable , Dawson has never had a problem holding the screen.
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There are other similarities including a nod to A Clockwork Orange with injured James McAvoy being photographed in his hospital bed alongside his PR-driven boss and a savvy pop soundtrack.
A sleek, modern update of such equally improbable hypno-noirs of the past as Alfred Hitchcock's "Spellbound" (1945) and Otto Preminger's "Whirlpool" (1949), "Trance" also is a puzzle film, in the relatively new tradition of "The Usual Suspects," "Memento," " Shutter Island " and " Inception ."
Trance is a member of the movie category defined by the likes of Shutter Island and Inception - films in which the concept of "reality" is flexible and the reliability of the narrative is indeterminate.