Vincent Cassell squares off with James McAvoy in Danny Boyle’s psychological thriller Trance.
After ruining and/or saving the London Summer Olympic opening cermony, director Danny Boyle (127 Hours) returns to the big screen with his most low-brow, pulpy film in a decade.
In Trance, an art auctioneer (James McAvoy, Welcome to the Punch) engineers the heist of an extraordinarily valuable painting with a slimy French criminal (Vincent Cassel, A Dangerous Method). Things go wrong during the heist and McAvoy ends up stealing the painting from Cassel before getting amnesia beaten into him.
Enter accomplished hypnotherapist Elizabeth Lamb (Rosario Dawson, Hotel Noir). Cassel hires Dawson to use hypnosis to tease out the lost painting’s location from McAvoy. As the therapy continues, however, Cassel grows more and more suspicious of McAvoy and Dawson’s motivations and the possible secrets they’re keeping from him.
It’s fascinating to place Trance within the larger context of Boyle’s career. While Boyle arrived with his visual and aural aesthetic largely formed, each successive film has seemingly taken him further and further away from reality.
Shallow Grave, his debut feature, was a film about some broke roommates, while Trance would have you believe that French gangsters live exclusively in houses that are 90 percent mirrors and orange Plexiglas.
Trance is firmly rooted in Boyle’s impossibly colorful and skewed vision of reality, a constantly shifting world of broken reflections, blues, oranges and reds. Every lurch, tilt and pan of the camera is both shocking and expected — I mean, you have seen 127 Hours, right?
But even with such an entrenched visual playbook, Boyle and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (Dredd) manage to pull half a dozen or so indelible compositions out of the ether: a rooftop overlooking the London skyline bathed in blood-red light, a POV shot zipping down an orange garbage chute and so on.
There’s the sense that Boyle and Mantle, liberated from the shackles of an Oscar-bait screenplay, have been set loose, free to splash paint all over the canvas however they wish. You see this creative freedom most obviously in the opening heist, strung together more like an acid trip music video set to Rick Smith’s propulsive original score.
The casual, free-form rhythm extends to the therapy sessions, with Boyle staging McAvoy’s hypnosis as a series of increasingly jarring, increasingly violent dreamscapes. Trance manages to cast an appropriately hypnotic state on the viewer, effectively hiding some of the weaker elements of John Hodge’s (The Sweeney) screenplay on first viewing.
I suspect Trance is a film whose character motivations crumple under tighter scrutiny, especially vis a vis the attempted gang rape in the third act that largely goes unmentioned afterward, and some meandering with Dawson and Cassel’s characters in the second act.
It’s to Boyle and Mantle’s immense credit, then, that most of these flaws go unnoticed. The clunky iPad exposition is a bit much, but everything else largely works thanks to the movie’s rapid and mesmerizing flow.
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