The film is based on the novel of the same name, written by a Swedish husband and wife team under the pseudonym Lars Kepler, and it contains every element you would expect from a Scandinavian crime drama, including snowscapes and jumpers and the occasional moment of extreme violence that takes you by surprise. All that snow has an almost soporific effect and then – bam! Out of nowhere somebody gets murdered. It’s the incongruity of it that appeals. The idea that under that soft cold blanket lurk the blackest of intentions. Bark’s wife (played by Lena Olin) then becomes the focus. She’s unhappy, tormented by an earlier affair Bark had, and unable to stand his sleeping pill addiction. Bark’s son is withdrawn and uncommunicative, and it doesn’t take long to establish that this is a family in crisis. It will take a terrible event closer to home before they can begin to start addressing their problems. So what we have is a two strand story – the detective and the hypnotist. But the two strands never seem to really weave together. The emotional stuff can be hard going at times, and the plot of the murders that should pull us through never gets moving. Detective Joona Linna has very little personality, and we learn nothing about his life, just as we learn nothing that feels substantial about other key characters. Lena Olin gives a great performance as the wife, but it runs the risk of coming across as overblown and plain annoying because she’s the only one getting to reach that depth of characterisation. For instance, can people in comas be hypnotised to speak? It’s a fascinating idea and reminded me of one of the three stories that appears in Roger Corman’s 1962 film Tales Of Terror. The Facts In The Case of M Valdemar gives us Basil Rathbone as a mesmerist who uses his skills on a man at the point of death. The body dies, but Rathbone keeps the soul trapped within it, unable to depart. Chilling and quite gruesome, that story comes back to me when I think of the boundaries of hypnotism. If a person in a coma can speak in such conditions, why not a person on the point of death? Or even beyond? The Hypnotist has this great central idea with the powers of hypnotism offering much, but I felt Corman did it more justice and injected it with more interest in a quarter of the time. I will read the book, I think, just to see how it differs. But if I want to watch something scary and thrilling about a hypnotist, it will be Basil Rathbone and Roger Corman for me every time. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.
