While Danny Boyle was busy turning himself into a national treasure during the Olympics he was making this twisty thriller. His Opening Ceremony was one of the great outside events, so he can be forgiven for taking his eye off the ball with his film. Trance is always watchable, never dull, but ultimately it’s Boyle-light. It’s very, very slight.
The plot is very Hitchcockian. James McAvoy is a trained auctioneer with huge gambling debts. The only way he can pay them off is to join up with a gang of thugs, headed by Vincent Cassel, to steal a priceless Goya painting from the auction room. The heist goes to plan until McAvoy gets hit on the head, and cannot remember where he hid the canvas.
Pulling his fingernails out doesn’t jog his memory, so Cassel is forced to bring in a hypnotherapist, Rosario Dawson, who is confident she can unlock McAvoy’s brain and find the missing painting. However, McAvoy’s mind is stuffed full of repressed memories and it takes many sessions to start to unpick the mystery. She suggests also hypnotising Cassel and his whole gang of thugs, with comical results.
However things get really serious when both Cassel and McAvoy fall for Dawson, and she seems to manipulate both of them but why? Is she after the picture too, or is she genuinely interested in them romantically? If so, which one?
The plot starts off in standard heist mode, before the second half gets very dreamy and very, very complicated. While the characters are well drawn and the plot moves apace, there is something a little hollow at the centre of the film. For a movie that is concerned with the inner workings of the brain a pretty complicated subject matter it’s all very superficial. Boyle’s visuals and music are their usual frantic self, with cross cutting, speeded-up sequences, bent-out-of-shape POV shots and pumping house music, but not much of it leaves a trace.
Weirdly the Goya painting, which is at the heart of the film, is actually very little seen surely its visual clues have more to say? One particularly strong sequence has a hypnotised McAvoy dreaming he visits a church in France stuffed full of masterpieces by Van Gogh, Modigliani, Rembrandt and Goya, but none can ever actually be viewed they have all been stolen, and presumably lost forever.
Every time McAvoy and Dawson get some sexual chemistry going, a plot point comes barging in to break it up. They are both terrific McAvoy is allowed to use his native accent, thank goodness, presumably as a nod to Boyle’s early Scottish films, and Dawson is very sensual and reveals she has a fantastic voice for film. Cassel, sadly, does his Pepe Le Pew franglais accent and is never that threatening for the head of a gang. Michael Fassbender was originally cast in the role and, sadly, had to pull out.
The many, many twists and turns in the second half end up blunting the impact of the film’s strong first half, and stretch credulity to snapping point. Are we really meant to believe a murder happens in broad daylight at the scene of the heist, with police and ambulances everywhere, and no one notices? Would Dawson really feel safe surrounded by thugs in their nightclub den and not only that, hold court?
Boyle reunites with Shallow Grave and Trainspotting writer John Hodge, and the resulting script is very talky, very plotty but without much in the way of insight. There’s lots of psychobabble about memory and the brain, but ironically very little of it is memorable.
Let’s face it, even Hitchcock made bad movies, as film historian Boyle would be the first to admit. He stretched himself with his play version of Frankenstein, and dazzled the world with the Olympics, but seems to have lost his edge with his day job. At one point Dawson, referring to Cassel, says “never forget he’s a criminal. Boyle seems to have temporarily forgotten what he does best.
Overall verdict: When Boyle’s work is seen in full this will be seen as a minor work. A flashy, stylish thriller but one which leaves as much mark on the memory as one of hypnotist Dawson’s therapy sessions. Something of a disappointment.
Reviewer: Mike Martin