Before the inevitable bloat of summer lands with exhaustingly overextended runtimes and confusingly interconnected universes, there’s some unpretentious fun to be had with Robert Rodriguez’s daft and brief little B-movie Hypnotic, written in 2002 and made as if it was shot soon after. It’s such a curiously dated thriller, from the score to the direction to the casting to the overall vibe, that at times it feels like Rodriguez is in full pastiche mode, as if this was a Far From Heaven-level homage deliberately designed to recall a very specific moment in cinema history.
Maybe he’s trying to feed into our collective desire to see mid-budget genre films that look like real films again, rather than whatever washed-out pieces of content Netflix dumps on our smartphones, and whether intentional or not, there is something satisfying in how slickly mid-2000s the whole thing feels. Back then it probably would have been more of an event – a mind-bending sci-fi thriller starring Ben Affleck with a $70m budget – but in 2023, it’s far from it, made back in 2021 and gathering dust ever since. Its original backers, cursed studio Solstice, imploded after just one release and so the Covid-impacted film was sold on, eventually finding its home at Ketchup Entertainment, a small distributor without any major titles to its name (last release was 2021’s Dr Bird’s Advice for Sad Poets).
After an unusual “work-in-progress” screening at March’s SXSW and before it makes its European premiere at this year’s Cannes film festival (a truly baffling scheduling decision), it’s being rolled out wide in the US with precious little fanfare. It will probably fail to find much of an audience this weekend (it’s tracking low with around a $7m opening expected) but later when it hits streaming (an eight-figure exclusivity deal has been promised to the Universal-owned Peacock stateside), those with that aforementioned itch might find plenty worth scratching.
I would argue that something as silly yet sturdily entertaining as this would have benefited more from a late summer release, welcomed with open arms after a season of films aiming that much higher yet, probably, landing that much lower. It might have been written in 2002 but it lives very much in the shadow of 2010’s Inception, a film also about a haunted father trying to get his family back by dealing with a reality-shifting mystery. For anyone who might have grown weary of Christopher Nolan’s dry self-seriousness with 2020’s tiresome Tenet, there’s something refreshing in Rodriguez aping his shtick without such a straight face. Affleck might be hampered with a frown but Rodriguez is clearly directing with a grin.
The dour and dependable star plays Danny Rourke, a detective who is still searching for his kidnapped daughter, a cold trail that heats up when a picture of her is found during an elaborate heist, seemingly performed by unconnected strangers. Clues lead him to psychic Diana (Alice Braga), who informs him of so-called “hypnotics”, people with the ability to control someone’s idea of reality, reshaping it to get them to do whatever they want. They’re led by a mysterious villain (William Fichtner going full ham) who may or may not know where Rourke’s daughter is.
The hypnosis acts as a fun trick that allows for an escalation of neat mind-fuck reveals, playing with our perception of reality along with the characters. Braga is lumped with playing Mrs Exposition in the first act but after a while, Rodriguez isn’t too invested in real coherence, playing fast and loose with the rules of the game, especially as his film enters the unhinged final third. There’s a fantastically silly twist, or at least a fantastically silly version of the twist the film keeps employing that adds an interesting and at times hilariously meta level of performance to both Affleck’s role and the film as a construct. Rodriguez is no Nolan, for better and worse, allowing his lean 93-minute film to glide without pretension yet he also opts for some stylistic choices that feel embarrassingly musty, such as an anonymously by-the-numbers score and some laughably sub-Inception world-bending imagery.
The goofier it all gets, the more one starts to warm to it, leaning further away from its initial A-trappings and nestling into a far more likable B-movie mode. As the season gets stuffier with bigger budgets and runtimes, it will act as a cosy reminder of what a summer movie looked like 20 years ago, and what’s more hypnotic than that?
Hypnotic is out in the US and Australia on 12 May and in the UK on 26 May
