Down the Memory Hole with ‘Hypnotic’

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Given his range as an actor, Ben Affleck is perfectly cast in Hypnotic. He plays scowling Detective Danny Rourke, an unhappy man after his seven-year-old daughter was kidnapped but never recovered. Rourke doesn’t buy the kidnapper’s story (he was deemed “mentally incompetent” by the court) of not remembering why he snatched the girl from the playground or where she is now. The department assigned Rourke to a therapist, but he sits stiff jawed through the sessions, saying little.

The Venetian blinds in the therapist’s office, casting bands of light and shadow, is the first clue that Hypnotic falls sideway into neo-noir through the door of science fiction. It’s not the first time sci-fi encountered the dark crime genre. Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) comes immediately to mind. But Hypnoticalso follows in another long cinematic legacy with its plot line of mind control through hypnosis. That one goes as far back as Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922).

Like Dr. Mabuse and unlike Blade Runner, Hypnotic isn’t set in an imagined future but in the present. Receiving a tip-off on the theft of a particular numbered safe deposit box, Roarke and his partner Nicks (JD Pardo) stake out the bank identified by the anonymous caller. The high-tech grunt work is carried out from inside a van furnished with cameras and microphones enabling them to watch and listen to conversations all over the neighborhood. However, the apparatus of surveillance is no match for what’s to come.

Rourke decides to get ahead of the heist by entering the bank vault. Opening the safe deposit box, he’s non-plussed to discover a photo of his daughter with a message, “Find Lev Dellrayne” (great noir villain name!). But Dellrayne (William Fichtner) finds him first and seems to control the minds of everyone he encounters—bank guards, cops … everyone but Rourke.

Writer-director Robert Rodriguez (Sin City) moves Hypnotic along with B-movie efficiency. Key plot points include tracing the anonymous tip-off to a fortune teller-tarot reader, Diana Cruz (Alice Braga). Her expositional dialogue eventually lays out much of the scenario. She and Dellrayne worked for The Division, a private contractor advancing U.S. interests across the globe—a psychic Blackwater wielding hypnosis as a weapon of mind control. According to her, elements of the Division went rogue, as unsupervised secret projects often do. Dellrayne became the most adept “hypnotic,” his powers challenged only by Cruz’s old colleague hiding in Mexico. And that’s just for starters. A skilled hypnotic can construct and impose entire realities, mini-Matrixes sucking Roarke, Cruz and the whole world down one rabbit hole after another.

Rourke’s imperviousness to hypnotic control is at first explained by “high psychic barriers” in his mind. Maybe being an emotionally bottled up, traditional American male isn’t such a bad thing when everyone is trying to read and manipulate your mind? Despite digressions into fiery explosions and physical mayhem, Hypnotic’s best scenes are atmospheric. Cruz’s tarot parlor is a marvel in ebony and deep maroon, darkness punctuated by lurid reds with all the emotionally anxious shades of a film noir in full color.

Hypnotic is screening at Marcus Southgate Cinema, AMC Mayfair, Marcus Ridge Cinema, Marcus Showtime Cinema, Marcus Menomonee Falls Cinema, Marcus Saukville Cinema, Marcus Hillside Cinema, West Bend Cinema and Cinemark Tinseltown USA.