Trance

Watched: September 27, 2013
Rating: 4.3
Duration: 1:41:49
Genre: Thriller / Suspense

“A hypnosis movie that can hypnotize the viewer”

Movies with multiple timelines and dimensions tend to confuse the audience, and they felt that they have to back out a little to understand what’s going on. When we watched Vanilla Sky, we had the same reaction of confusion, but at the end it was satisfactory to know that the confusion paid off with a nice, subtle, unrevealing ending

Back to Trance.

The CONS

The movie starts strong. We get hooked almost instantly. We do not have certain fondness for art and paintings, but with Trance our interest soared. James McAvoy is narrating onset. This can be fun. Mysterious perhaps. We start imagining how it sounds like it’s the movie Wanted, with McAvoy narrating and all. The interest heightens; we know we are glued to the screen. We cannot miss a scene, even if we feel like going to the john, we have to stay put and watch what’s going on
Then we learn where the movie’s heading. The story starts unfolding, and we realize…. Wait a sec, that’s it??? That’s the conflict? You want us to buy into that problem? He forgot where he placed it? We do that too, we do that every day with the remote. We can’t help but rationalize: there is no actual conflict in this film. It’s like everything is imagined, and it might as well be

The PROS

You might think we’re contradicting ourselves. First, the CON that we mentioned is the conflict presented in the film, the driving force in the plot. We do not buy in to that. We are not convinced. However, the movie, in its entirety, is awesome. The shifting from one timeline to another is mind-boggling but fun. The movie is highly entertaining. Every scene is a puzzle, we have to stick around

When the story unfolds, we get excited, we anticipate what’s gonna happen, and we expect that we are wrong. So many things going on, reality and hypnosis are presented in the same platform, so the audience is given the freedom to decide and choose. Because of the film is multilayered we are forced to make a guess, forced to take a shot of knowing the unknown. The scenes toward the latter part came as a surprise, and we feel we have to engage in a surprise, and make our own guess on what is real, and what’s the truth. Of course we are wrong, and when the truth is revealed on the last part, we feel cheated, we feel we are misdirected, but still, we are satisfied. It is like we are put in a trance, and we just go along with it

VERDICT. 4.3 rating. It’s this one movie where you would feel that owning an iPad is the coolest thing