Trance

I wish I could tell you about my current projects, but I can not right now, so I won't. Instead let us talk about Trance for a moment. This post will be full of spoilers so glance away now if you do not wish to be spoiled.

I love Danny Boyle. He's got to be one if my all time favourite directors and pulls off psycho thriller like a pro. Anyone who has seen Shallow Grave or 127 hours will know this man can really mess with your head. This film was no exception. From start to finish I was in a sustained state of "wow!" The look, the feel, the way the story unfolded it was brilliant. So obviously I went to see it again. Sad to say I kind of wish I hadn't.

Unlike films like Fight Club, where, if you go back over the movie, all the pieces fall into place and everything suddenly makes sense. You start questioning if you are in fact an idiot for not noticing in the first place. Trance is not one of those movies. Trance has plot holes. These are largely minor, and necessary for the story to work properly, but when they come together as a whole, for me it ruined the experience. Now I'm asking myself, couldn't there have been a better ending?

My two main niggles are this:
1. How did the hypnotherapist know that Simon had killed that woman? She wasn't there. She only knew what he had told her. I questioned whether she had in fact been following him, after all, at the end it becomes apparent that she had been manipulating events from the start. If that was the case though, why did she cry upon meeting him again? Why did reading his story on the internet upset her so? It doesn't quite scan.

2. If Simon was such a big creepy stalker, why did she continue therapy with him? She's too afraid to answer the phone or email but was quite happy to lock herself in a room with him for several hours? Ok so she had a motive for allowing the sessions to continue, ok fine, but do you think someone so desperate to see her that he tried to strangle her would casually show up for his session and calmly sit and be hypnotised when just hours ago he was trying to break down her door? It doesn't make sense. It may not even be relevant, but for a very character driven plot, for me it was a suspension of belief too far. However without this backstory, the film doesn't work. It's a necessary plot device, for the story to end in the way it did, these characters needed to be set up in they way they were. Unless of course, there was a different ending.

I'm not a writer, and I am not going to claim anything that I come up with could be better than what was already in the film. But I'm going to take you through my thought process upon first watching the film.

There was a moment, after the car crash and fire, when Franck broke the surface of the water and was suddenly in his swimming pool at home, I thought I had a moment of clarity where I understood what was happening. Of course I was wrong, but I'm starting to think I would have preferred to be right.

When Simon first goes to see Elizabeth to find his keys, she tells him to create a character. She says "create another man who can do the work for you."  In that brief moment in the pool, I thought, perhaps Simon was a figment of Franck's imagination. He created Simon to find the painting HE HIMSELF had lost. Perhaps the entire film had been the work of the hypnotist. Of course the "he woke up and it was all a dream" is a horribly unsatisfying ending, but I can't help but think if handled correctly, and we all know how well Danny Boyle can handle twists,  maybe it would have worked out better. Perhaps it would have been brilliant had it been left a little more open ended. The hypnotist creates the entire situation and the character of Simon. Simon leads Franck through the fire to find the painting, she then, armed with that knowledge steals the painting, and Franck wakes up in his pool very confused and dazed and THE END.


The audience is confused. They discuss it for days. It's likened to Fight Club and Inception. Is that necessarily a bad thing? I don't know. All I can say is GO SEE THIS MOVIE. Don't think to hard, submerge yourself in it, but don't over analyse because it may just ruin what is an incredibly slick and exciting couple of hours.