Mometimes artistic ideas need time to be implemented. Director Robert Rodriguez harbored a desire for more than a decade to make an Alfred Hitchcock-style film. His film “Vertigo” was to blame for this, Rodriguez told this newspaper (it can be read on page 6 today). In “Vertigo,” British suspense master Hitchcock looks at a former police officer, played by James Stewart, who falls in love with a woman, watches her fall to her death, and then meets another who resembles the deceased and who he then tries to transform his clothes and hairstyle into her image, only to eventually question his sanity and wonder if it isn’t actually the same woman – a film about obsession and grief, a poetic psychological thriller through and through.
Rodriguez is not known for injecting psychoanalytic analysis into his work, but instead had men with guitars and machine guns fighting for life and love on the Mexican border in his early independently produced action films like Desperados and El Mariachi and recently achieved blockbuster status with comic and manga films such as “Sin City” (after and with Frank Miller) and “Alita: Battle Angel” (after Yukito Kishiro). So what does he mean when he says his film is inspired by Hitchcock?
On the one hand there is the level of action, the elements of which are reminiscent of films such as “The Invisible Third” (1959, Cary Grant flees from assassination attempts aimed at his double) or “I fight for you” (1945, Ingrid Bergman tries to find out through dream interpretation what is real and what is fictional of Gregory Peck’s memoirs). “Hypnotic” begins with a rap: metal on paper, pen on pad. A man comes to himself. His eye focuses, the pupil sharpens: orange light falls into a therapy room, a psychologist taps her pen with her notes. She asks police officer Danny (Ben Affleck), who has just opened his eyes, what he remembers about his daughter’s kidnapping. Danny tells every parent’s nightmare: look the wrong way for a moment and your child will disappear from the playground. The man who was arrested for the crime, headlines later reported, couldn’t remember anything. The case remains unsolved.
Danny throws himself into his work. He is called to a bank robbery where people suddenly begin to act as if remotely controlled: a woman complaining of the excruciating heat and madly runs undressing in the middle of the afternoon traffic, a bank teller suddenly closes her counter and leads a mysterious stranger to the lockers, two cops, instead of arresting the suspect, point their guns at Danny. None of the people can remember the deeds afterwards. Danny goes on the trail of the stranger and meets a psychic (Alice Braga) who tells him that this can only be the work of a so-called “Hypnotic”, a person who can hypnotize others with his thoughts alone and so theirs changes their perception of reality, even imposes his orders on them.
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