Hard-Boyled

Trance

***½  out of ****

Directed by: Danny Boyle

Starring: James McAvoy, Rosario Dawson, Vincent Cassel, Danny Sapani and Tuppence Middleton

Running time: 101 minutes

The best films are the ones that have a hypnotic power over you. They grab you with force, fill you with wonder and leave you satiated, eager to revisit the trip again. The latest film from eclectic director Danny Boyle, best known for 28 Days Later and Slumdog Millionaire, is just that: an electric rush of intoxicating entertainment and one of the most ingenious noirs in recent memory.

Trance, despite middling box office results in North America and Boyle’s native Britain, is the director’s trippiest head rush since he broke through with Trainspotting in 1996. The script comes from that film’s scribe (and frequent Boyle collaborator) John Hodge and Joe Ahearne. It is something of a miracle, a twisty story that maneuvers between three characters and the unreliable headspace of one’s subconscious. Doubt lingers even as the excitement remains.

Trance begins in a London auction house, with our protagonist, Simon Newton (James McAvoy), addressing the camera with how the protocol works on securing the institution’s most valuable artworks. As he explains via voice-over, “no price of art is worth a human life.” Simon is working with a bunch of thugs, led by the slimy, threatening Franck (Vincent Cassel), to rob a $27 million Goya painting.

However, the heist goes awry, as Franck strikes Simon in the head and makes off with a package – but not one containing the Goya. When Simon returns to consciousness, he cannot remember what he did with the painting after swiping it. Franck and his cronies realize that the key to where the painting lies is hidden in Simon’s mind.

To uncover the painting’s location, Franck decides to put Simon in hypnotherapy sessions. Simon begins attending sessions with one of London’s best, Elizabeth Lamb (Rosario Dawson). When she begins suspecting an ulterior motive to unlocking the secrets in Simon’s mind, Elizabeth makes a deal with Franck for a piece of the $27 million artwork.

As Elizabeth puts Simon under her trance, his mind keeps giving him, the other characters and, accordingly, the film’s audience, mixed signals – and that’s just part of the film’s dizzying fun.

Like any sophisticated neo-noir, Trance is chock full with power shifts among our anti-heroes. Each character keeps taking advantage of the situation, and the balance often tilts in three different directions (and it changes depending on whoever subjective space the spectator occupies). Boyle’s mystery jets off at a throttling pace but only slowly unfolds character details that give the audience clarity on where things stand.

As the conflicted everyman with gambling debt who is also gambling with the lucidity of his own doubts, McAvoy is terrific, confident but slightly mad as he tries to figure out a tricky situation with an even trickier subconscious. There is also more to Cassel’s pouty, disgruntled thief and Dawson’s slyly intelligent hypnotherapist, but to spoil any more would be criminal.

Even when it is not dismantling the audience’s already fragile perception in the characters’ dream spaces, Trance looks ecstatically dreamy. Frequent Boyle collaborator Anthony Dod Mantle’s camerawork is lush, especially an exquisite pan-up that reveals a nude Rosario Dawson, and Jon Harris’s slick cutting never wastes a moment nor lingers too long on an image that will come up again toward the end. The throbbing synch soundtrack, from electronic musician Rick Smith, worms into your mind as if you were going under.

Trance is likely too bizarre and enigmatic (not to mention brutal and bloody) to catch the attention of those who are not hardcore Boyle fans. Nevertheless, it is a bloody smart one, and it expects the audience to keep up with the shady spins on the plot mechanics and the characters’ motivations.

Cunning and complex, Boyle’s latest goes a tad haywire in the last 15 minutes with an outrageous action sequence straight out of Jerry Bruckheimer’s playbook. However, this is a terrific addition to Boyle’s canon, as exciting, irreverent, unpredictable and bleakly funny as the early chapters of the filmmaker’s oeuvre. Trance put a spell on me.