Hypnotic (2023)

Robert Rodriguez's Hypnotic arrives as a puzzle box assembled from the spare parts of better puzzle boxes. Ben Affleck plays Danny Rourke, an Austin detective who spends most of the running time in small rooms, receiving explanations. The film wants to scramble your sense of what is real. Mostly it scrambles your patience.

On the cultural ledger, the film is close to blank. The cast is admirably mixed, with Alice Braga and Dayo Okeniyi in substantial roles, and the screenplay never asks us to think about what that mixing means. Braga's Diana Cruz holds genuine power and drives the back half of the plot, though the script treats this as a mechanism, not a statement. No hierarchy is indicted. No environment is mourned. No body is celebrated. No mind is diagnosed for our edification. This is a movie about people standing in rooms explaining hypnosis, and it is content to remain that.

Instead, we get a mid-budget thriller that treats mind control as a parlor trick and memory as a rug to yank. The twist arrives, then arrives again, and the energy sags as the exposition stacks up. Critics were unkind. Audiences shrugged. The whole enterprise grossed enough to purchase a modest ranch on Deer Valley Lane, which is more than most secret government programs manage. There is something almost admirable in a 2023 release so indifferent to the moral fashions of its moment. It has no sermon to deliver. It simply wants to hypnotize you, and it fails, but it fails honestly.