Film Review: "Trance" (2013).

"The choice is yours. Do you want to remember or do you want to forget?" This question is asked by the time you have viewed Trance. This British drama thriller film directed by Danny Boyle. The film centers around a fine art auctioneer who becomes mixed up with a group of criminal partners and then joins forces with a hypnotherapist in order to recover a lost painting. As boundaries between desire, reality and hypnotic suggestion begin to blur the stakes rise faster than anyone could have anticipated.

The inception of this project began after director Danny Boyle filmed Shallow Grave in 1994, Joe Ahearne sent the director his screenplay for Trance, seeking Boyle's encouragement. Boyle thought that the project would be "quite difficult" for a beginning screenwriter. Ahearne later turned the script into a 2001 television movie. Boyle never forgot it, and almost two decades after their original conversation he contacted Ahearne about turning it into a feature film. Trance underwent script doctoring by screenwriter John Hodge – marking the fifth motion picture collaboration between Hodge and Boyle.

The film stars James McAvoy, Rosario Dawson, and Vincent Cassel. The performances in this film were outstanding and equally complex as the other, challenging and deceiving each other with their own secrets to hide. McAvoy, who has never been better as the tortured hero, draws you in with a love story that will appeal even to non-sci-fi fans. Giving one of his best performance since The Last King of Scotland. Dawson gave a dramatic and emotionally driven performance as the hypnotherapist who plays the main character's key to unlocking his memories, and the woman with a dark and complicated secret. Finally Cassel gave gripping and cool performance as the film's gang leader.

Smart, innovative, and thrilling, Trance is one of those rare film that succeeds viscerally as well as intellectually. The film is a wildly ingenious chess game and the result is a knockout. It is a conceptual tour de force. It applied a vivid sense of procedural detail to a fiendishly intricate yarn set in the labyrinth of the unconscious mind, Boyle has devised a heist thriller for surrealists, Inception-like, that challenges viewers to sift through multiple layers of (un)reality. It feels like Stanley Kubrick adapting the work of Carl Jung. Boyle delivers another true original: welcome to an undiscovered country. It is all about process, about fighting our way through enveloping sheets of reality and dream, reality within dreams, dreams without reality. It's a breathtaking juggling act. Boyle has shown us one of the best in terms of modern filmmaking. If you're searching for smart and nervy entertainment, this is what it looks like. Boyle, like Nolan, regards his viewers as possibly smart—or at least as capable of rising to an inventive level. That's a tall order. But it's refreshing to find a director who makes us stretch, even occasionally struggle, to keep up.

Simon says Trance receives: