Trauma
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Actor: Colin Firth, Cornelius Booth, Dermot Murnaghan, Dorothy Duffy, Naomie HarrisBrand: First Look Pictures
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 94 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-06-14
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: First Look Pictures
DVD Reviews of Trauma
DVD Review: "She's not passed over, she's not dead!"
Summary: 3 Stars
There's not much to recommend in this over-acted, protracted, muddled, and quite boring mixture of flashy imagery and MTV style cinematography. Trauma tries so desperately to be some kind of innovative, visually arresting, all-original psychological thriller, when in reality, it's yet another film about a man with a tenuous grip on reality, with all of his weird memories and hallucinations gradually coming full circle.
Colin Firth stars as Ben, an artist who wakes up in a hospital ward to find that his beloved wife, Alyssa (Naomie Harris) has been killed in a car crash. Ben blames himself, as he was driving the car and they were arguing just before the crash. On the same day, however, he finds out that a beautiful rock singer, Lauren Parris (Alison David) has been found brutally murdered in a canal.
Ben, fraught with grief, mourns the death of Alyssa, while the rest of England laments over the death of Lauren. Perhaps the two deaths are connected? Alyssa was one of Lauren's back-up dancers, and the facts suggest that Ben was more than just a casual fan of Lauren's. An especially dogged police inspector refuses to let the evidence, albeit circumstantial, go unnoticed. Was Ben responsible for both murders, or is it all just a product of his deranged, grief-stricken mind?
In an effort to start a new life Ben rents an apartment above a spooky, abandoned morgue (yes really, a morgue above apartments!), which is administered by a strange and sinister caretaker (Cornelius Booth). Helped by his best friend Roland (Sean Harris) Ben begins to get back to work painting houses, but he continues to be plagued by visions of his deceased wife. Could she still be alive? Or is he going mad?
Soon Ben befriends the beautiful Charlotte (Mena Suvari), a woman in a neighboring apartment who encourages him to attend a local meeting led by Petra, a psychic (Brenda Fricker). When Petra tells him that he is crippled by grief, and that his wife has not yet "crossed over," and is probably not even dead, Ben proceeds to freak out even more. As he steadily goes downhill and loses his grip on reality, the viewer is invited to question what is reality and what is the product of Ben's increasingly unhinged mind.
Memory, hallucination, obsession and, of course, the trauma from the accident itself all are part of this very disturbing and disquieting story. What is real and what is in the mind's eye are constantly in question. Is Ben a cold-blooded killer, or is he suffering from some sort of posttraumatic, delusional stress from the accident?
Trauma is intriguing for the first ten minutes or so, but the plodding storyline combined with the convoluted visual approach make it hard going. There's lot of quick jump cuts, endless close-ups of Ben's sallow face, and flashy, gratuitous cinematic flourishes that don't particularly advance the plot and just seem to clutter the proceedings. The ending is just as confusing and hard to figure out as the beginning, and most viewers will be left scratching their heads in stifled bewilderment absolutely none the wiser.
Director, Marc Evans has visual flair and a talent for hard-noir stylistics, but in Trauma he just lays it all on a bit too thick. It's also difficult to keep up interest in this movie when we're indifferent to Ben - who complete with fanatical scribbling, sweaty rambling and wide-eyed staring - basically emerges as just another compulsive and neurotic ruffian. Firth does his best with the material, but he's often too forced and strained, as though he's trying to make something of a role (and a story) that just isn't there. Mike Leonard July 05.
Description of Trauma
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