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).
