Trance Trades the Heist for a Hypnotherapy Session — and It Mostly Works

Danny Boyle’s Trance is a heist movie that stops being a heist movie about ten minutes in and becomes something stranger: a hypnotherapy session with a gun pointed at it. The film follows Simon Newton, a man who botches a museum heist and loses the painting he was meant to steal. To find it, the gang kidnaps him and hires a hypnotherapist named Elizabeth Lamb to recover his memory. What starts as a crime thriller ends up being a study of obsession, memory, and the difference between what we want and what we say we want.

The setup is simple. Simon is the inside man on a job that goes wrong. He hits his boss, Franck, over the head and takes a package that turns out to be empty. The gang discovers the painting was cut from the frame and hidden somewhere. Simon has no idea where it is, and neither does anyone else. So they hypnotize him.

James McAvoy plays Simon with a nervous energy that shifts from charm to terror within seconds. He is the kind of man who can smile at a therapist and then flinch when a door closes behind him. Vincent Cassel plays Franck as a predator who never loses patience, even when his prey stops talking. Rosario Dawson plays Elizabeth as the smartest person in the room, a woman who knows she is being used and uses it back. The supporting cast, led by Danny Sapani as Nate, fills out the gang with menace without stealing focus.

The film moves through three distinct acts, each tied to a hypnotic state. The first act is the heist itself, the second is the kidnapping and the early sessions, and the third is the descent into Simon’s fractured mind. The transitions between these states are smooth, but the film does not explain its own rules. We are told Simon has amnesia, but we are never shown how deep it runs. We are told the hypnosis works, but we are never shown how it fails. This is a movie that trusts its audience to sit with uncertainty, and sometimes that trust pays off.

Where the film stumbles is in its central question: why does Simon fall for Elizabeth? The answer the movie offers is transference, a psychological term that means a patient transfers feelings onto their therapist. That is fine as far as it goes, but the movie treats the romance as a mystery rather than a mechanism. We see Simon lie to Elizabeth, we see him hide from her, and we see him return again and again. None of it adds up to a reason. The film wants us to believe the painting is buried in Simon’s memory, but it never shows us how to dig.

The heist itself is a brief, sharp sequence. The museum is quiet, the security is weak, and the painting is gone before anyone notices. The tension comes from Simon’s panic, not from any clever plan. The kidnapping scenes are tense, but they are also repetitive. The gang tortures Simon, Simon forgets, Simon remembers, the gang tortures him again. The cycle repeats until it becomes a rhythm rather than a threat.

The film’s best scenes are the ones between Simon and Elizabeth. Their conversations are sharp and funny, and Dawson plays Elizabeth as a woman who knows she is being played but doesn’t mind. There is a moment where Simon asks her to pretend to be his wife, and she agrees. That scene lands because the movie has spent enough time establishing that Elizabeth is smarter than everyone around her. She is not a victim, and she is not a pawn. She is a professional doing her job, and she enjoys it.

The ending is a twist, but it is a twist that answers a question the film never asked. Simon finds the painting, but the film does not explain why he stopped looking. The final scene, set in a hospital, is quiet and unresolved. It leaves the viewer with a question that the movie never answered: what was the point of all this?

The film’s weakness is structural. It is a movie about memory that refuses to commit to its own logic. The hypnosis works, but we never see how. The painting is found, but we never see why. The romance develops, but we never see its cause. These gaps are frustrating, but they are also part of the film’s design. Trance is not a puzzle box waiting to be solved. It is a mood piece, and the mood is dread.

Trance is a good film that is too clever for its own good. It has a strong cast, a sharp script, and a director who knows how to build tension. But it is also a film that is more interested in style than substance. The heist is a footnote, the kidnapping is a setup, and the hypnosis is the main event. That is a bold choice, but it is not a consistent one. The film is at its best when it is focused, and at its worst when it is trying to be mysterious.

Trailer, via SearchlightPictures.

Danny Boyle · hypnosis · James McAvoy · Trance · Vincent Cassel