| I'm hanging my hopes on the international
market, particularly Trauma and the Ministry of Fear here in Britain, and
watching for the next wave of emerging maestros from Hong Kong and Japan
to scare the bejesus out of a new generation of horror fans. |
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22 January 2004 (The Hollywood Reporter)
Sundance Film Festival
PARK CITY -- "Trauma" is the poor man's "Memento". It is a spiraling,
flash-cut visualization of one man's meltdown following a car crash in
which his wife was killed.
Starring Colin Firth as Ben, the driver who wakes up in a hospital ward to
find that his beloved wife is dead, "Trauma" is a mega-reality brain
tease. Memory, delusion, obsession and, of course, the trauma from the
accident itself all are part of this very disturbing story. What is real
and what is in the mind's eye of Ben are always in doubt. And the question
eventually arises: Did he kill his wife before the accident? .
Although "Trauma" is a dazzler, it's also a snoozer. Once the quick cuts
and flashy cinematic flourishes subside, the story dissolves into a
protracted muddle. Although we're mesmerized by director Marc Evans'
visual pyrotechnics and hard-noir stylistics, it's difficult to keep up
interest when we're indifferent to Ben, who emerges as an obsessive lout.
Screenwriter Richard Smith shows ample gifts, combining intrigue with the
horror-of-personality genre. Yet, his character construction is overtly
clinical: Ben's mental turmoil and how it connects to the death of his
wife never satisfyingly congeals. Admittedly, the story is well-wired, but
it nonetheless short-circuits because of the essential crudity of the
characters, including dogged investigators, weird neighbors and other
generic types. Not to mention bugs, which are all over the place. Such
excessive imagery comes across as anthropological/psychological wanking.
Fortunately, "Trauma" recovers from its character deficiencies on the
technical front. Cinematographer John Mathieson's dazzling noir scopings
revive our eye even when our brain has turned off to the story. Editor
Mags Arnold flexes a surgeon's precision in connecting the cinematic
synapses of this hypervisual drama, while production designer Crispian
Sallis shows us the character's conflicted mind-sets much more succinctly
than the story does.
Compounding "Trauma"'s narrative fractures, it's also hard to understand
the Queen's English, especially when snarled by Firth. Supporting players
are similarly bludgeoned by the writing, namely Mena Suvari as Ben's
spacey neighbor and Brenda Fricker as a clairvoyant. Both come across as
character pawns rather than flesh and blood -- the lack of which is fatal
with this "Trauma". |
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Screen Daily Feb 2 2004
Actor Colin Firth goes some way to rescuing his screen persona from being
forever enslaved to his romantic alter ego Darcy with his morose presence
in Trauma, in which he plays the spooked survivor of a car crash.
Dishevelled, disorientated and anything but dashing, Firth's mental
meltdown continues to hold the attention even when the fragmented plotline
veers into some murky cul-de-sacs. An ambitious exercise in cinematic
atmospherics, the film plays best as a haunting meditation on grief and
self-delusion, rather than as the outright boys-horror film one might have
expected from the director behind the low-budget My Little Eye.
Indeed, Trauma has more in common with Krzysztof Kieslowski's metaphysical
Three Colours: Blue, about a young woman unhinged by the accidental death
of her husband and daughter, than it does a conventional chiller. There
are creepy moments, for sure, and a culminating death unpleasant enough to
register with fans of the macabre - particularly those who suffer from
arachnophobia. But the slow-burning mood of ominous portent counts for
more here than any storytelling shock and awe. Trauma trades in fear, not
fright.
The anguish begins in hospital where Ben (Firth) emerges from a coma to
learn that his wife (Harris) has been killed in a car accident of his own
doing. Or maybe not. In his stricken condition, Ben finds it increasingly
difficult to wrestle fact from fiction. Visions of his wife torture him
and so too the recent death of a pop superstar that seems eerily close to
home. Perhaps he killed her instead? Retreating into an altered state of
mental despair, Ben seeks refuge wherever he can - an enigmatic neighbour
(Suvari), a psychoanalyst, a clairvoyant (Fricker), even his collection of
ants. But each of them succeed only in tormenting him further. By the end,
his tenuous grip on sanity has been torn away completely and he lashes out
to devastating effect.
Marketing this story, which will be released in the UK through Warner
Bros, will require ingenuity. Its likeliest audience appeal lies somewhere
in the space between Firth's legion of female groupies and that narrower,
predominantly male vein of puzzle addicts who loved being teased by films
like Memento. Their common ground might be represented by Don't Look Now,
a seminal film that was steamy enough to be a date movie, but also artful
enough to keep the most ardent suspense fans guessing. In the case of
Trauma, the question is whether there is enough emotional involvement or
cryptic mystery to tempt either constituency into seeing Trauma at
theatres, rather than waiting to see it at home.
Those that do pay at the box office will at least be rewarded by a UK film
whose visual and aural virtuosity sets it apart from the
television-influenced social-realist dramas and comedies that have come to
typify this country's output. Dressed in neo-gothic garb, this is a more
mythical take on contemporary London than we are used to.
Every trick in the cinematic armoury, from elliptical editing to menacing
production and sound design, is deployed to create an angst-ridden canvas.
But this technical tour de also comes at the expense of audience
engagement. In the past, before MTV music videos and Avid digital editing
suites changed the filmmaking vocabulary, directors like Don't Look Now's
Nicolas Roeg could rely on shadows and dark motifs to unsettle viewers.
But with even Hitchcockian devices now too hackneyed to truly disturb
anymore, the tendency has been towards sensory assault and ever more
disjointed narratives in order to keep ahead of viewer anticipation in
this kinetic, post-modern age. The problem here is that not every image
makes sense, even on a subliminal level; rather that unlock the door to
our subconscious fears, this impressionistic barrage of incongruities ends
up baffling. This is dislocation to the point of distraction.
On the positive side, Welsh filmmaker Marc Evans is nothing if not
prescient. My Little Eye, his previous film that took the reality TV
concept to horrific extremes, was developed before the Big Brother series
had even hit British television. Trauma, his immediate follow-up to that
claustrophobic cult favourite, effectively plugs into the emerging
zeitgeist of dread and anxiety. Trauma was one of three unnerving Sundance
psycho-dramas - along with November and The Machinist - that played tricks
with memory and time to the point where fantasy and reality melds into one
hallucinatory mindscape. It is not too much of a stretch to see in such
films the first signs of a return to the paranoia and unease that marked
cinema at the height of the Cold War in the late 1950s. |
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Rich Cline
Shadows On
The Wall
There's an eerie
creepiness about this psychological thriller that really gets into your
head, thanks to extremely intriguing direction from Evans (My Little Eye)
and a strong central performance by Firth.
When Ben (Firth) wakes from a coma he only has fragmented memories of the
car crash that put him in the hospital and killed his wife (Naomie
Harris). Completely shattered, he tries to put his life back together with
the help of his pal Tommy (Flanagan) and an all-new flat with a friendly
neighbour (Suvari) and a helpful handyman (Sean Harris) lurking
downstairs. Then a psychic (Fricker) tells him his wife is alive, and in
his stunned confusion, he mixes his wife's death with the murder of a
local pop star, thinking maybe he did it.
This is a closely focused film about a man who simply has lost the ability
to separate reality from dreams and nightmares. And Firth is very good as
a guy haunted by his entire life--past and present--trying desperately to
make the right decisions, but frankly ill-equipped for the task.
Especially as various truths begin to dawn here and there around him. It
certainly keep us on our toes! And since we see everything through Ben's
foggy eyes, the surrounding characters are all fascinatingly unsteady,
seeming to shift between friends and foes with each new bit of
information.
With such a limited and untrustworthy point of view, the film is
reminiscent of Memento, although without that film's emotional depth and
bracing originality. It touches on issues such as survivors' guilt, denial
and celebrity stalking, but without really exploring them emotionally. Ben
is a strangely cool figure, with odd habits (like his massive ant farm)
and extremely awkward relationships with those around him. This makes it
hard for us to feel very strongly about him, which in turn leaves the film
feeling a bit slim. Fortunately, Evans fills the screen with such moody,
atmospheric, evocative visuals that we're still gripped, especially as the
plot twists start flowing.
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From
"The Scotsman"
Trauma
Just a trick of the mind
Alastair McKay
Starring: Colin Firth, Mena Suvari, Naomie Harris
Directed by: Marc Evans
When Marc Evans's first film, My Little Eye, previewed in Edinburgh, the
screening was interrupted by an outburst of paranoia. The film was a
reality TV horror, with a group of crazy kids in a Big Brother-ish
house. Instead of facing eviction, the housemates were being killed. But
by whom?
Towards the end of the film, Evans abandoned restraint. The body count
was high. The terror was cranked. The soundtrack was a symphony of
discordant industrial sounds. A rhythmic bleeping began. Eventually,
someone noticed that the sound was a fire alarm, but as the film only
had five minutes to run, the audience was reluctant to leave. Suddenly,
one of our number, a venerable critic, stood up and started shouting:
"Nobody leave. It's what they want us to do. It's a test."
Well, it wasn't. But it might have been. The sense of dread was real
enough, and My Little Eye marked Evans out as a director with a mastery
of mood and a command of fear. He also showed an understanding of the
cinema experience: the film is nowhere near as effective on DVD.
Trauma is two steps sideways. It has the same visual style, and it
continues the director's fascination with the difference between
perception and reality, but it swaps narrative coherence for a series of
trick mirrors. The action takes place within the mind of Ben (Colin
Firth), who has survived the car crash in which his wife died and awoken
from a coma to discover that the country is in mourning for Lauren
Parris, a pop star, who has been found murdered in a London canal. Ben -
whose mind flickers between flashback and nightmare - is wracked with
guilt and confusion. Was he to blame for his wife's death in the car
crash? Was there some connection between him and the dead pop star? Who
is the scary man in the snorkel parka who keeps appearing in the local
market, like a Britpop version of the dwarf in the duffel coat in Don't
Look Now?
The opening scenes play around with the notion of the kind of communal
grief that now attends high-profile deaths. The response to the pop
star's murder is an outpouring of vague gloominess and petrol station
bouquets, placing the event as a cross between the death of Diana,
Princess of Wales, and the murder of Jill Dando. As in My Little Eye,
Evans seems to be criticising media-generated narratives. Ben observes
the scenes of mass grieving on the television in his hospital ward, and
wanders off in his gown, muttering "My wife's dead".
The story unfolds according to changing perception of the central
character. As Ben is suffering from a mix of amnesia and something
approaching paranoid delusion, the inside of his mind is not a pleasant
place to linger. We see him in therapy, angry and unable to grieve.
There is talk of forbidden rooms, and everything is bathed in a cold
blue light. He wanders along a derelict corridor when - boo! - a spooky
stranger jumps out and says, with the vague threat of the caretaker of
the abandoned gold mine in Scooby Doo: "Entrance to the old morgue".
Yes, conveniently, Ben's house is in a half-converted hospital. His neighbour across the hall is a moon-faced girl (Mena Suvari), who
introduces herself in the manner of a Gold Blend advert. The moon-faced
girl then takes him to see a medium, who tells him his wife isn't really
dead. A detective (the splendid Kenneth Cranham) turns up, wondering
where he was on the night of the pop star's murder.
And so it goes. There is a nasty scene involving a spider, and several
instances of the Ominous Train sound effect they use on EastEnders to
signify Bad Things.
Still, Firth does a good turn, and Evans shows himself to be a dab hand
with visual distortion. His vision of London is chilly, and the sense of
menace swirls prettily. But, kids, would you go down in the abandoned
mortuary with a man who keeps ants as pets?
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Trauma (2004)
Starring: Colin Firth, Mena Suvari, Naomie Harris, Tommy
Flanagan, Sean Harris, Brenda Fricker, Ken Cranham
Director: Marc Evans
Running Time: 98 minutes
US MPAA rating: N/A
UK BBFC rating: 15
Drama, Horror, Thriller
After crashing his car one rainswept night, artist Ben (Colin Firth) wakes
from a coma, only to discover that his beloved wife Elisa (Naomie Harris)
was killed in the accident. Delirious with grief for Elisa, at a time when
everyone else is grieving the recent murder of pop superstar Lauren
Parris, Ben moves into a new apartment built over a morgue, in an attempt
to rebuild his broken memory and life. His recovery is helped somewhat by
his regular sessions with a psychiatrist whom he has been seeing ever
since the death of his mother during his childhood - and his friendly new
neighbour Charlotte (Mena Suvari) seems to fill in the void left by
Elisa's death - but Ben's mind continues to play tricks on him, and when
Inspector Jackson (Ken Cranham) accuses him of stalking and implicates him
in the slaying of Lauren Parris, Ben is forced to confront some
uncomfortable questions: why does he keep seeing the dead Elisa? who keeps
obliterating the paintings and photos of her in his apartment? what
connects him to Lauren Parris? and is it just coincidence that Charlotte
shares her name with the aunt who looked after him, and then abandoned
him, as a boy?
Not to be confused with Dario Argento's film of the same name, 'Trauma'
is, like David Cronenberg's Spider' (2002), a gothic psychological
thriller with a tragic twist, about a damaged man trying to get back his
grip on reality in the dingier by-ways of London - and it acknowledges
this debt to Cronenberg in full by prominently featuring several spiders,
both fake and real, in the web of its plot. Director Marc Evans has
brought from his last film, 'My Little Eye', an obsession with
surveillance and the media. Characters seen on TV news reports enter Ben's
room moments later, Ben finds his own image lurking in the background of
photos in celebrity magazines, and in one particularly unnerving episode
near the film's beginning, everyone around Ben in a busy open market
suddenly freezes, revealing that he has unwittingly walked through, and
been filmed in, a police reconstruction scene. All this, along with some
disorienting flashbacks and jumpcuts, creates a kaleidoscopic
fragmentation of reality in which the viewer feels as lost and paranoid as
Ben himself.
From playing the original Darcy in the BBC's 'Pride and Prejudice' to a
modern-day Darcy in
Bridget Jones's Diary, as well as having principal parts in mainstream
romcoms like 'Fever Pitch',
Hope Springs and
What a Girl Wants,
Colin Firth is the British romantic lead par excellence, and the very
presence of his name on the marquee guarantees 'Trauma' a broader audience
than a film so bleakly nightmarish might otherwise garner. It is not,
however, just for commercial reasons that this is an ingenious piece of
casting, for Firth is here once again playing his typical role as a
romantic dreamer - only one who is waking up to a far less salubrious
reality - and he makes an effective transition within the film from
confused lover to just plain confused. Mena Suvari, the other big-name
star in 'Trauma', cannot quite match up to Firth's acting abilities, but
again she is cleverly cast, reprising from 'American Beauty' a role that
is half projected male fantasy and half ordinary girl-next-door
(literally, in the case of 'Trauma').
Not a film to watch if you are looking for Firth's usual feel-good factor,
but if you like atmosphere, amnesia, angst and ants (and who doesn't?),
'Trauma' has it all - and as the first film from Ministry of Fear, a new
horror offshoot from successful production company Little Bird, it heralds
a new era of quality British gothic cinema.
It's Got: Creepy gothic sets, disorienting use of film
within film, a surprisingly unhinged performance from Colin Firth, some
reality-jarring twists, and a mood of tragic melancholy.
It Needs: A psychiatrist.
Alternatives: Spider' (2002), 'Don't Look Now', Fight
Club, 'Eraserhead'
Summary: Superbly grim and unsettling psychological
thriller in which Colin Firth at last gets to show his stubbly side.
8/10
Review by Anton Bitel
Movie- Gazette
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