Movie Review: Despite Filmmaking Flourish, 'Hypnotic' Proves Too Absurd To Take Seriously

There's a touch of inauthenticity in the trailer for this film, which stars Affleck as a detective who pulls off a bank robbery while wracked with guilt over the kidnapping of his young daughter.

In fact, there's something about the first 30 minutes of "Hypnotic" that sounds wrong — it feels like Rodriguez is casually doing a sketchy exercise in the tropes and noir detective aesthetic. But then you realize it's intentional.

Because things are not what they seem in "The Hypnotic," detective Danny Rourke (Affleck) finds out as he descends the rabbit hole of this unsolved bank robbery, which ends with the discovery of... a Polaroid of his missing daughter in a safe ends . He follows the signs of local psychic Diana Cruz (Alice Braga), who uploads a confusing synopsis of the "hypnotic constructs" used by a mysterious man at the scene of the robbery, whom they identify as Delrain (William Fichtner). ). based on the writing on the polaroid.

This is how Rodriguez's "The Hypnotist" plays out, a hybrid of "Inception", "The Truman Show", "Rashomon" and "The X-Men". After several years directing television and music videos, Rodriguez returned to his roots as a filmmaker and independent filmmaker, shooting in his backyard in Austin, Texas and serving as cinematographer (along with Pablo Beron), editor and co-producer in his duties as author and director. , as he often does.

Some three decades after his feature film El Mariachi, Rodriguez continues to make films with the same run-and-gun indie ethic, and The Hypnotic is indeed a refreshing reminder of that, as well as his innate ease with filmmaking. . In "Hypnotic," Rodriguez plays with an understated aesthetic for the various spaces of this story, shooting on location and using different lighting schemes and color gradients to demonstrate his mastery of camera movement and image composition, with an actual director behind the lens .

But it's also about the script written together with Max Borenstein and the stars. The plot can only be described as completely intricate - so much explanation, room for illustration and yet not enough. Poor Braga was left with all sorts of utter nonsense about a secret government program to develop "hypnotic constructs" and the psychics who created them and used them as weapons.

And yet not enough attention is paid to the story's emotional underpinnings that would make us care about these people, or why we don't want them to become the government's psychic weapons, and without that it all feels so weak at. The story is terrifying and impossible, twisting and stretching even after the credits roll (no Hypnotic 2 please).

Affleck also has a flair for detail. Maybe he just wanted to play in Rodriguez' sandbox for a while, and there's nothing wrong with that, but his game is utterly sluggish. In his hoarse Batman voice, he whispers loud taunts at the distraught, grizzled, white-cheeked detective Rourke, but he's not a man of action, but rather a man of reaction, sadly stifled by his unspoken powers. Arms crossed while standing like a character in The Sims – this is supposed to indicate which way the wind is blowing in Hypnotic.

As a fan of the film, one must respect the steadfast independent spirit Rodriguez works with, freeing these projects from the traditional Hollywood system and carving his own path in the industry. It's nice to see him in new genre film colors, but the script and performance of "Hypnotic" are too ridiculously funny to take seriously.