Imagine you have an interesting idea, and the studio wants a 100 minute film from you. Only problem is, your idea only fills up about 30 minutes before it's exhausted.

There is a solid thriller in here somewhere, but it's bogged down with so much unnecessary shite that it doesn't even know what it's trying to be anymore. There can only be so many twists and turns before you're in an entirely different city. There's only so much meandering I can take and if it's at the point where I'm thinking ''Can we just, like, move on?'' then the eagle has already landed my friend. I will say I enjoyed the direction, the blurring, colour, frantic camerawork, more screenwipes than…

It's a very bizarre experience for me to come out of a film so high on its superficially engaging effects that I'm ready to sing its praises, but days later all I want to do is rip it apart. Trance made me feel like I was watching an intelligent and sophisticated thriller. It's only after some distance that I realized there's nothing left to figure out, no questions to ask, nothing to discuss. It just sort of sits there like a really pretty but empty box with the word "MYSTERY" written on it.

Toward the end, it reveals everything you need to know or wondered up until that point and then shows a bunch of repeated scenes from earlier in…

Danny Boyle’s Trance is very engaging but it fails because it tries to be too smart for its own good and too explicit so as to dumb down the viewer’s intelligence.

The first 50 minutes of the film were so exhilarating and is without a doubt the best part of the film. The theme felt similar to Inception. Even the setting of a heist and the group formation looked similar. But Boyle’s thoughts and presentation are always special, different and minimalistic. The film is powered by some great camerawork and editing which Boyle’s relies heavily on to take his stories on to the next level. Those two departments in Boyle’s films do so much to cover up for the relatively…

Gentlemen, let's talk about structure.

Structure is the number one thing any film requires, even if there isn't a narrative to speak of. It's just the way the brain works. Even when you watch one film and there are two separate plot lines, you try to find the relationship between the two, and when they converge. You see this a lot in multiple thread ensemble films.

In straightforward films like, say, Raiders of the Lost Ark, there is a clear structure of cause and effect that creates a momentum, and an internal consistency. It's also not just in the way a narrative plays out. It's in the characters and their motivations. It's in the dialogue (even lines of dialogue should…

I like Boyle's films. I particularly like the energy he brings to them, usually making them better than they have any right to be. But when the script of a film is as bad as Trance's, not even that energy can save it.

This is not a complicated film. It is a poorly written film that tries to be smart while all it does is obfuscate the fact that it is a simple, uninteresting and bland story. Well, it tries to but fails miserably.

A great mystery is like solving a puzzle from which someone has taken away a couple of pieces. The problem with Trance is that the pieces that were taken away are inconsequential and trite. Not only…

"No piece of art is worth a human life. - Simon

Trance messes with your head as much as it messes with its protagonist's head. And that gets messed around an awful lot. On top of severe injuries to his cranium, there's false memory implants (or are they?), hypnotism and hallucinations being forced into poor Simon's mind. But is all what it seems on the surface? No...

Danny Boyle is a personal favourite of mine, so I was immensely excited for his first twisty thriller since his debut, Shallow Grave. Boyle has also been an incredibly stylish film-maker, so I was intrigued to see what he would do with this. Expecting both intelligent twists and highly fashionable style, Trance delivered.…

I really dug Trance and much more than I expected to. It isn’t anything groundbreaking but it is swiftly directed and so good to look at. The way Boyle and his DOP use colour, glass and reflections is really awesome and puts you in a Trance at times which I’m sure is the intention.

The plot is a clever concept and it works for the most part. It can be a little messy but I think that’s the point when there is so much mind bending going on. It’s never boring but can be quite convoluted upon reflection but to be honest, I was so invested and entertained before all the revelations occur and so I ate them up mostly.…

2013 Ranked
Non-2021 First Time Watches Ranked
Directors Ranked: Danny Boyle

Well that was a mindfuck...

Trance is an amnesiac heist thriller, I think that's the best way to describe it. When you're watching it, you have to be paying attention because despite it's shorter runtime, there is a lot that happens, with twists and turns and other such shit.

The cast in this is pretty good. James McAvoy is fantastic in the lead. He is supported well by a whole lot of Rosario Dawson, and thankfully less of Vincent Cassell. All three have to show a wide range of emotions and they pull it off really well.

I wanna give a shoutout to the editing in this film, because…

Prominent Directors — Danny Boyle

Trance sure took a turn. The film starts with a heist on Goya’s Witches’ Flight which goes wrong when an inside job is messed up by fine art auctioneer. With its fake-out action heist, you wouldn’t be faulted to think that Trance was going to be a contemporary heist thriller. Yet, the film swerves from that and with one knock to the head of Simon, Trance turns into a metaphysical journey that dives into the mind. Danny Boyle has revamped the physical act of a heist into a metaphysical one. Trance uses hypnotherapy to dive into the psyche of James McAvoy’s Simon. This quickly sees a kaleidoscopic result as reality, desire, and dreams blend together.…