Trance movie review & film summary (2013)

In a movie that runs largely on outlandish plot twists, it hardly qualifies as a spoiler to reveal that Simon was in on the robbery. The problem, though, is that the knock on the head delivered by Franck has made him lose his memory; he can't remember where he hid the painting, or even why he hid it. After torture proves ineffective, Franck decides to try a more unorthodox method: hypnosis. He hands Simon an iPad ("Trance" is sick with Apple product placement) and lets him pick out a hypnotherapist. He chooses American expatriate Elizabeth (Rosario Dawson) because, he says, he likes her name.

It doesn't take long for Elizabeth to figure out that Simon isn't really looking for his lost car keys. She confronts the gang and makes Franck give her an equal share in exchange for retrieving "Witches in the Air." Simon, she says, can't remember what happened to it because of repressed anxieties. Finding the painting means first figuring out what makes Simon tick.

It goes without saying that Simon turns out to be more than just a patsy, and that Elizabeth's motivations go beyond wanting a break from the monotony of treating overeaters and premature ejaculators. Part of what makes "Trance" entertaining — if not especially believable — as narrative is its go-for-broke nihilism. Its plot plays fast and loose with the audience's sense of the characters, some of whom go from sympathetic to downright scary.

"Trance"'s major problem is also its selling point: It's a Danny Boyle movie. Shot by Anthony Dod Mantle — who won an Oscar for his work on Boyle's "Slumdog Millionaire" (2008) and has shot all but one of the director's features since "28 Days Later" (2002) — the movie has all of the hallmarks of a digital-era Danny Boyle flick: hyper-saturated colors, deliberately mismatched angles, and eccentric compositions that disorient the viewer without ever embracing Tony Scott-style abstraction. While not as visually kaleidoscopic as "Slumdog Millionaire" or "127 Hours" (2010), "Trance" is still a lot of fun to look at.

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