Hypnotic (2023)

Plot of Hypnotic: Danny Rourke is a police detective who is obsessed with trying to find his daughter who at about the age of six went missing. In his business as a detective he and his partner, Nicks, witness a robbery where the robber seems to influence people around him, leading somehow to Danny finding a picture of his daughter in a safe deposit box. He finds his way to the shop of a fortune teller, Diana Cruz, who tells his about an organisation which trains “hypnotics”, and that the bank robber is a man called Lev Dellrayne. Dellrayne  hypnotises Nicks into attempting to kill Rourke, forcing Rourke to kill him, and resulting in he and Cruz going on the run into Mexico. It appears that the hypnotics are capable of wiping their own memories to prevent others finding out stuff, and one of the things to find out appears to be the location of Rourke’s daughter. When Rourke gains access to the hypnotic organisation’s data base, all is revealed, but he still has to find his daughter.

Content: Only the vaguest inference that sex has taken place. There are scenes in bars so probably a bit of drinking. Rourke is interviewed by a therapist and is involved in the bank robbery, a diversion created by a woman who takes her top off and runs into the road. Once Rourke finds Cruz, she is almost continuously explaining the plot. Some quite unpleasant scenes as people injure themselves in their determination to do Rourke harm. But Rourke is having his mind controlled, and is able to shake it off and escapes into a compound where there is construction indicating that everything he, and we, have experienced is a lie.

A View: No-one much liked this outing, and at the time of writing it only seems to have recouped $12.3 million of its $65 million production cost. I didn’t like it much either but have had a job to think what was wrong. The principle problem  might be that even the first act plot is really about the hypnotics, so we are not too surprised when it turns out that everything is a fake. But if this level of mind control is possible, why is it that they need physical props to support their fakery. None of it really stacks up, and actually we don’t like anybody so we don’t care whether they survive or not.

Fun Fact: You need to stay for the end credits to see how the story ends.