Entranced

You might think that it would be a risky enterprise for someone like myself, so given to dozing off in the cinema, to go to a film with hypnotism – and therefore presumably the putting to sleep of various subjects. I am positively thrilled to report that not a wink was had – much less forty – although I seem to have most handily forgotten all about the movie trailers we saw just before the main feature, so I may have been somewhere else at that time.

A wacky premise here: high end art auction house with a set procedure to save the most valuable art from theft. Theft situation arrives and then it gets complicated for us all. The gang that has arranged to steal the painting finds itself with an empty frame and needs to find out where the painting is. The trouble? The auction house employee who conveyed the painting – or at least the sleeve that was supposed to contain the painting – to the safety slot was knocked out and has lost his memory.

The "randomly chosen" hypnotherapist who is going to help find the missing painting has secrets of her own, including some bad experiences with unsavoury portions of our auction house employee's past and some rather close encounters with one of the members of the gang.

There's a fair amount of violence and some surreal gore (the above head was talking quite clearly), and it takes quite some time to unravel the complexity of the layers of deception planted by some handy hypnotism. For my money, though, this was a much better way to get through layers of complexity than was Inception, and Rosario Dawson is both hot and cool in her role.

If you're wondering who comes out on top, I will only say that it's someone who is both hot and cool (and I never said that Rosario Dawson's character was the only one in that category).

A little post screening amusement, too. A couple a couple of rows ahead of us was making out during the credits. It has been quite some time since I have seen that in a cinema (maybe not seeing the right films?), but I can understand how gunfire and explosions would make you want to kiss…