Hypnotic (2021)

Hypnotic is a 2021 Netflix thriller directed by Matt Angel and Suzanne Coote, written by Richard D'Ovidio, and starring Kate Siegel as a software engineer who seeks hypnotherapy after a stillbirth and a breakup. The premise promises a descent into mind control and paranoia. The execution delivers a cat-and-mouse story involving a sinister therapist, a detective, and a fail-safe planted in the heroine's subconscious. It is the sort of film that plays like a Lifetime movie that wandered into a Halloween slot and decided to stay.

From a social consciousness standpoint, the film is almost aggressively neutral. The cast includes Black actors in supporting roles, including Dulé Hill and Jaime M. Callica, but their presence is unremarked and carries no racial commentary. No LGBTQ themes appear. A woman leads the story, yet her ordeal is framed as standard thriller victimhood and survival, with no feminist argument about gender or power. Climate concerns, anti-capitalist critique, body positivity, and neurodivergence advocacy are absent. Hypnosis is a plot device, not a metaphor for neurodiversity. The film does not revise history or lecture the audience about contemporary morals. It wants only to unsettle and occasionally gross out. That is a modest ambition, and it meets it unevenly.

Critics were not kind. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 24 percent, Metacritic at 33. The Guardian called it an unrewarding slog. RogerEbert.com found it dopey but never quite dopey enough. That assessment feels correct. The film has a crazy-eyed villain performance and a few neat twists, but its script is pedestrian and its scares are borrowed. For anyone cataloging progressive markers, Hypnotic is a near-empty vessel. It has no agenda beyond making Jenn shoot her hypnotist. In an era of sermonizing entertainment, there is something almost quaint about a thriller this devoid of message. It is not good. It is merely harmless.