Trance (2013)

After quite a long time, during which we had a life drama - "Slumdog Millionaire" and a real life drama - "127 Hours", in "Trance" Danny Boyle returns to something with a consistent part of psychological thriller. Let's see if it went good or not ...

The beginning of the movie offers one of the most original intrigues that I've had the chance to catch on screen in a while. Light spoiler: Simon works for an action house, which is attacked during a sell for a Goya painting. As the movie will show after something like 15 minutes Simon also works for the thieves. Which thieves have the surprise that the stolen painting is just an empty frame. Because at some point during the robbery Simon did hide the actual canvas. After which, somehow he managed to get a heavy hit on his head. After which, awaken with amnesia in the hospital he doesn't recall anything about the painting. Obviously, the rest of the criminal group is not very pleased, and after a short torture session they reach the conclusion that Simon really has a memory problem. Solution: let's look for a hypnotherapist that will bring it back. And we should say what ? that we stole a painting and we don't know anymore where we hid it ? Complicated. Ok, I'll stop here because you can already start watching the movie a quarter past the opening credits after all I've said.

What's above might sound more like action with a comic touch. Far from the truth. The movie switches to a psychological thriller by the book and as dramatic as can be in the end. As you can imagine, the action revolves a lot around the hypnosis and its effects. So much that at some point it gets hard to track and a bit to overdone in its attempts of "mind-boggling" for a subject that is resolved relatively simple in the end. Simpler than you would imagine at least = I've had the sensation of a predictable ending but not completely confirmed = in my head I got in the end to have a more entangled script than the one in the movie. Maybe it was the collateral effect of the hypnosis on the screen, who knows ...

The cast was excellent. James McAvoy in the most confirming part since "The Last King of Scotland", Rosario Dawson in a role that made me change the opinion about her ( and it's not related to the nude scenes :) ), Vincent Cassel as negative character completing the exceptional "series" that I had the luck to see lately (after Hook in "Neverland" and Khan in "Star Trek"). Editing and cinematography as in Boyle movie = flawless. For soundtrack he seems he gave up for the moment on the collaboration with A.J. and got back to Rick Smith co-author on some tracks from previous movies ("Trainspotting", "The Beach", "Sunshine"). The result, surprisingly good, has many influences on the same direction with the movie title = trance. To make a comparison, it reminded me of the score from "Drive".

So' what's wrong: if the ending would have been a bit different, if the script would have been a bit more coherent, and as a personal note if some action threads wouldn't have been handled in such a ... cold manner, I would put it on the same level with "Sunshine", "Slumdog Millionaire", "28 Hours" and what Boyle has in his CV on its top positions. Since it's not there, I only can place it a bit above "The Beach". So, the movie is clearly good and deserves watching it, but ..

Rating: 4 out of 5 ( hardly )