In the cinema we sit, staring at the screen, waiting for Danny Boyle’s new film Trance to begin. And so it does, Simon (James McAvoy), the auctioneer turned thief behind the Goya painting that he was supposed to be helping to sell, is sat staring back at us. He lays down the rules, “No piece of art is worth a human life”. Is he saying this in retrospect, having learnt his lesson? We don’t know. Trance is a film of the mind, and the mind is scrambled, amnesiac, and just like that we’re never sure where we’re at.
We move, sometimes confusingly – maybe purposefully so – between the mind, imagined or memorised. So too, we move between characters, from seemingly taking Simon’s perspective at the beginning, it later feels like we are with other characters, firstly Franck (Vincent Cassel), the leader behind the heist, and then Elizabeth (Rosario Dawson), the hypnotherapist who tries to help sort through Simon’s memory after his part in the heist goes wrong. Trance is Nolenesque in its construction of narrative levels, think Memento (2000) or Inception (2010), crosscutting between perspectives and realities. It’s admirable that Boyle has tried to follow Nolan’s lead in creating a thriller with the capability to grip and fool today’s cinema going population, but unfortunately Trance never really manages to pull it off.
A film where thieves break into the mind using hypnosis, in order to make the audience feel as though they’re in a kind of cinematic trance, sounds like a decent enough concept, but unfortunately the film doesn’t have the same hypnotic effect on us that Simon experiences. The film is too much style, its crosscutting and hazy photography is dazzling, but once you leave the cinema you can deduce that you never went far beneath the surface, that you didn’t face your deepest emotions, that you’ve learnt nothing. And so, when Simon taps the screen (he is really tapping the boundaries of his own memory) it’s supposed to wake us from our cinematic trace, but pause a second and you’ll realise that you weren’t far under hypnosis anyway.
Similarly, despite the complex mental blueprint, you’re never really trapped, or gripped, by the maze. As soon as Franck absurdly suggests visiting a hypnotherapist you know that you’ve been led astray, and attempts to lure you further inside are so obviously so that they become the breadcrumbs to your escape.
Trance has several similarities with the recently released Welcome to the Punch (2013), not least that they both star James McAvoy, who is, in Trance, terribly miscast. Secondly, both films are set in a dark and dangerous London. The London of Trance is illusory, its bright lights fractured and misleading, its countless roads – shot from above – winding in and out of each other but only leading to parking-lot dead-ends. Perhaps the point of Trance is this illusiveness, the stolen Goya painting is merely a MacGuffin, which is irrelevant beyond stimulating the chase, but for us in the audience, constantly searching for thin air is ineffectual. The effects, therefore, are nifty, and are supposed to work in service of the film’s hypnotic form, but delve deeper and you’ll find nothing there. Trance is like Welcome to the Punch in many ways, but unfortunately never more so than because neither lives up to their admirable ambitions.
We move, sometimes confusingly – maybe purposefully so – between the mind, imagined or memorised. So too, we move between characters, from seemingly taking Simon’s perspective at the beginning, it later feels like we are with other characters, firstly Franck (Vincent Cassel), the leader behind the heist, and then Elizabeth (Rosario Dawson), the hypnotherapist who tries to help sort through Simon’s memory after his part in the heist goes wrong. Trance is Nolenesque in its construction of narrative levels, think Memento (2000) or Inception (2010), crosscutting between perspectives and realities. It’s admirable that Boyle has tried to follow Nolan’s lead in creating a thriller with the capability to grip and fool today’s cinema going population, but unfortunately Trance never really manages to pull it off.
A film where thieves break into the mind using hypnosis, in order to make the audience feel as though they’re in a kind of cinematic trance, sounds like a decent enough concept, but unfortunately the film doesn’t have the same hypnotic effect on us that Simon experiences. The film is too much style, its crosscutting and hazy photography is dazzling, but once you leave the cinema you can deduce that you never went far beneath the surface, that you didn’t face your deepest emotions, that you’ve learnt nothing. And so, when Simon taps the screen (he is really tapping the boundaries of his own memory) it’s supposed to wake us from our cinematic trace, but pause a second and you’ll realise that you weren’t far under hypnosis anyway.
Similarly, despite the complex mental blueprint, you’re never really trapped, or gripped, by the maze. As soon as Franck absurdly suggests visiting a hypnotherapist you know that you’ve been led astray, and attempts to lure you further inside are so obviously so that they become the breadcrumbs to your escape.
Trance has several similarities with the recently released Welcome to the Punch (2013), not least that they both star James McAvoy, who is, in Trance, terribly miscast. Secondly, both films are set in a dark and dangerous London. The London of Trance is illusory, its bright lights fractured and misleading, its countless roads – shot from above – winding in and out of each other but only leading to parking-lot dead-ends. Perhaps the point of Trance is this illusiveness, the stolen Goya painting is merely a MacGuffin, which is irrelevant beyond stimulating the chase, but for us in the audience, constantly searching for thin air is ineffectual. The effects, therefore, are nifty, and are supposed to work in service of the film’s hypnotic form, but delve deeper and you’ll find nothing there. Trance is like Welcome to the Punch in many ways, but unfortunately never more so than because neither lives up to their admirable ambitions.