Anyone fancy a trippy rummage around James McAvoy’s mind?
Yes? (As if you wouldn’t want to!)
Well then you’re in luck!
The handsome actor, who surely must have a brain worth poking around in, is starring in Danny Boyle’s new trippy psychological thriller, Trance, as Simon, a fine art auctioneer who, after engineering the theft of a priceless Goya painting from an art auction, suffers a violent knock on the head by underworld boss Franck (Vincent Cassel) and promptly forgets where he stashed the purloined artwork.
Despite constant threats from Franck and the gang, he sticks to the line that he has amnesia – I suspect he may simply be conveniently using the attack to keep the art for himself by faking memory loss but part of the mystery, of course, is whether he does or doesn’t really recall the painting’s location – f0rcing Frank to bring in a charismatic hypnotherapist (Rosario Dawson) to do the aforementioned brian rummaging so he can finally get his hands on the stolen artwork.
Naturally enough, extracting the required information isn’t as easy as everyone assumed, as this extract from the film’s plot summary makes abundantly clear:
“… as they journey deeper into Simon’s jumbled psyche the boundaries between reality and hypnotic suggestion begin to blur and the stakes rise faster and far more dangerously than any of the players could have anticipated.” (hypable.com)
Trance certainly promises to be a very different type of thriller than the usual fare, especially with its Inception-esque overtones, and that’s exactly what Danny Boyle, director/producer of Transpotting, Sunshine and Slumdog Millionaire, among others, was aiming for as he told USA Today:
“It begins like that [an old-fashioned conventional caper film]. But it takes the idea of a stolen painting and develops into something sleeker and more psychological, with twists and turns.”
He goes on to say:
“I wanted to do an updated noir, give it a contemporary spin in terms of emotion. Noir is usually cold. I wanted it to be more emotionally charged.”
It certainly sounds like something out of the box and well worth waiting for.
The movie opens on March 27 in the UK, with international dates to follow.
In the meantime, I will be with James McAvoy helping him to, you know, remember …