Main cast: Kate Siegel (Jenn Tompson), Jason O’Mara (Dr Collin Meade), Lucie Guest (Gina Kelman), Jaime M Callica (Brian Rawley), Tanja Dixon-Warren (Dr Stella Graham), Luc Roderique (Scott Kelman), and Dulé Hill (Detective Wade Rollins)
Directors: Suzanne Coote and Matt Angel
Jenn Thompson, having lost her job and feeling a bit conflicted over hooking up with her ex Brian again, decides to accept the invitation of Dr Collin Meade, whom she meets at a party, to go for a hypnotherapy session, conducted by him of course.
Oops, it turns out that Dr Meade isn’t just a psycho, he is also more of a super villain than a mere hypnotherapist. He has mastered some super secret skills that he now uses to wreck Jenn’s life, such as making her hallucinate things and even paralyzing her entire body with just a few trigger words.
You know, I could use some of those powers myself, but alas, the two hypnotherapist that I know of give me weird looks when I ask them about such powers. Is this movie a steaming pile of crock… or are those hypnotherapists trying to deny that they are capable of doing these things because they don’t want to share them with me? Hmmph!
Make no mistake, Hypnotic is a higher-budget Lifetime woman-chased-by-psycho movie, right down to the main character doing a slew of stupid things and, my favorite, doing a online search for Dr Meade after she realizes what a villain he is, and finding the guy’s entire criminal record online in just a few minutes.
It’s a shame that Dr Meade’s hypnosis powers don’t boost Jenn’s brainpower in the process, because every bad decision she can make, she’ll make it here. She doesn’t seem to learn at all, so she will confront him, alone and unarmed, over and over again even after her previous encounters left her defeated and humiliated.
When she hears someone screaming for help in her own home, she approaches slowly instead of quickly, so yeah, that fellow is really in critical condition by then.
She hallucinates a spider on her chest, and instead of stopping the vehicle by the roadside to ask her passenger to help brush the spider off, she accelerates the vehicle and gets the two of them in a bad car accident.
I can go on and on, but come on, I’d still be here by Christmas if I did this, and who has so much time to waste. Let’s just say that the only smart thing she does here is to finally do that magical online search that gives her all the information she needs in a single click of a link, but even then she blows the opportunity to make good use of the information.
Dr Meade isn’t that smart either. He can go as far as to paralyze his victims and even make them kill those that are in his way, but for some reason, he seems to resort to the most useless course of actions that let his targets run free over and over, and he also sends the most incompetent types to do his work for him. For someone with so much power at his hand, he is more of a Wile E Coyote than anything else.
Hypnotic tries hard to be super serious, which is a big mistake because of how stupid the premise and the main characters are. Perhaps this one would have worked better if it had gone all out to be camp and over the top?
Too bad I can’t just snap my fingers and make myself believe that I have never wasted my time on this thing.
