Disc Reviews

The Hypnotist Review

• 22nd Sep 2014

Scandinavian crime stories have become popular over the past few years both on TV and on the big screen with such shows as ‘Wallander’ and Stig Larsson’s books starting with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in book form and on screen. There was also Easy Money which was released last year on DVD in the UK which came highly recommended by Martin Scorsese. All the more surprising then that The Hypnotist did not receive a theatrical release (even though it was shortlisted for the 85^th Academy Awards, although did not reach the final four). The story, one can well imagine, would play quite well as a Hollywood remake with the likes of such actors as Morgan Freeman playing a lead role. But this is not a Hollywood film, but most certainly is one with a Scandinavian sensibility.

As already mentioned the story has the Scandinavian cold to it. It begins with the gruesome mass murder of a family: first the father is stabbed to death in a school gymnasium before the killer goes to the dead man’s home and violently murder’s the mother in the kitchen, the young daughter who was watching TV and left a teenage boy near dead with stab wounds in the bathroom. After the police arrive at the scene it transpires that there is also a teenage daughter who is in a care home leading the police on a mad dash to find where she is and save her. The boy lies in a hospital bed and is traumatised by the events which had taken place. Detective Inspector Joona Linna is convinced that the killer is determined to kill the whole family and makes steps to track the killer down as well as protecting the survivors. He calls on the services of Mikael Persbrandt, a hypnotist who has the ability to put his patients into a deep trance and unlock their subconscious. He proceeds to do this with the surviving boy and doesn’t like what he comes across. Meanwhile, Mikael is also having marital problems while struggling with his role as a hypnotist helping the police to virtually giving up on his family. The family are drawn further into the web after Mikael Persbrandt takes sleeping pills due to his insomnia when they receive a night time visit from an intruder who drugs the wife who is barely lucid when their 14-year-old son is kidnapped by the intruder threatening their lives further. So now he must also use hypnosis to find his own son.

The Hypnotist is directed by the legendary Lasse Hallström and this was his first film in his native Swedish for some 25 years. Hallström had made the Oscar winning The Cider House Rules (1999), Chocolat (2000) starring Johnny Depp and Juliette Binoche as well as the underrated country family drama, An Unfinished Life (2004) starring a grizzled Robert Redford and Jennifer Lopez. Hallström is able to bring this gritty Bergmanesque type of mood to this Swedish film he otherwise may have struggled with in Hollywood (although the aforementioned An Unfinished Life and The Shipping News, 2001 had this northern European moodiness to them). The acting, with the exception of the always wonderful Olin is not the greatest and the plot perhaps gives itself away as to the identity if the killer about halfway into the film but never the less it is worth sitting through and is suitably violent in places with an ending that has to be said seems to have come straight from Hollywood of the Misery variety – I’ll say no more. Yet the most violent scene is the aftermath of the murder in which the kitchen shows clear signs of a struggle with the mother draped battered over an upturned kitchen chair. The title, however, is something of a misnomer as it relies less on some supernatural ability to ‘see’ things than it does on human relationships and their complexities but is definitely worth a watch. No extras.

Chris Hick