Hypnosen

Ernst De Geer (2023)

I took a chance with The Hypnosis at the London Film Festival.  It’s Ernst De Geer’s first cinema feature.  I recognised only one name in the cast (Herbert Nordrum, who did fine work in Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World (2021)).  From the very brief synopsis in the LFF brochure, I quite liked the sound of this Swedish comedy but a major factor was to allay guilty conscience about the lack of foreign language films in my Festival selection.  I made a lucky choice.  The Hypnosis is very clever and thoroughly entertaining[1].

André (Nordrum) and Vera (Asta Kamma August) are partners in life and work.  We first meet them rehearsing a pitch for ‘Epione’, an app that they’ve developed.  Named for the Greek goddess of (what would now be termed) pain relief, the app is designed to benefit women’s health around the globe:  it’s data-light so usability doesn’t depend on sophisticated or expensive technology.  André is concerned that Vera’s part of the pitch – referencing her own first period and her haemophilia – may be ‘too heavy’ but the couple’s experienced mentor, Lotta (Andrea Edwards), assures them the personal touch is a plus.  Vera and André are all set for ‘Shake Up’, a three-day programme of workshops on which they’ve won a coveted place alongside other young entrepreneurs.  Led by a big-name pitch coach, the event will culminate in participants presenting their start-up ideas – in competition – to potential investors.

Early scenes establish that Vera is a smoker, also that she’s self-effacing and acquiescent.  Just before Shake Up, she goes for a hypnotherapy session, which André dismisses as ‘mumbo jumbo’.  Vera wants help with quitting smoking rather than changing her personality but she mentions  her doormat tendencies to the therapist (Karin de Frumerie) in their preliminary conversation.  The hypnosis that follows doesn’t turn Vera into a non-smoker but alters her behaviour in other ways, as the next few days make emphatically clear.  At first, the changes seem modest and positive.  To get to Shake Up, André and Vera borrow a car belonging to her mother, Eva (Alexandra Zetterberg), and call in at her house.  Eva – successful and well connected in the world in which Vera and André are trying to gain a foothold (she knows the guru who’ll be leading their workshops) – routinely disparages her daughter.  She’s surprised when, on this occasion, Vera answers her back.  André is surprised, too, but pleased:  as soon as they’re out of Eva’s house, he commends Vera for standing up to her mother.  He’s less (and less) happy once Shake Up is underway.  In the workshops, at ice-breaker social events and in their hotel bedroom, Vera is uncharacteristically exuberant.  The pitch coach, Julien Berger (David Fukamachi Regnfors), instantly takes against earnest, awkward André but seems to like Vera’s vividly eccentric candour.   The more that André struggles to say the right thing, the more Vera publicly undermines and humiliates him.  In the privacy of their room André blames Vera’s transformation on her hypnotherapy.  She assures him that was just mumbo jumbo.

As satirical comedy, The Hypnosis is subversive to a very well-judged degree.  As you’d expect, the script, which Ernst De Geer wrote with Mad Steggers, lampoons the pretensions and falsity in evidence at Shake Up.  Julien Berger is loathsomely slimy and self-approving.  A rival entrepreneur (Moa Niklasson) begins her patter with ‘Water:  we need it, we drink it!’ and Vera’s  professed haemophilia is revealed to be a tactical invention.  The air is thick with virtue-signalling, culminating in a passive-aggressive exchange between André and another contestant about the relative importance of women’s healthcare and climate change.  The workshop sessions ooze jargon.  Yet for a good part of the film it’s André – increasingly the misfit in this company – who’s made to appear the most ridiculous figure on the screen.  At one point, he literally doesn’t fit in.  He stumbles into a conflab – involving Julien, other Shake Up hopefuls and Claudia (Kristina Brändén Whitaker), one of the investors they’ll be looking to impress – to which he wasn’t invited.  André squeezes himself into the only free chair in the room, which is higher than the rest, and perches on it precariously.  He can’t get any part of his long legs, never mind his feet, under the table.

De Geer has a target larger and more complex than workshops and pitch culture.  The Hypnosis satirises the present-day mania for self-actualisation – for showing who-you-really-are; the film asks, in effect, whether expressing your true personality is necessarily a good thing.  Well aware that choosing a female character as his focus could lay him open to charges of misogyny, De Geer takes care to poke fun at male vanity as a route into the core satire.  André is fronting a feminist business venture and by no means a blatant male supremacist but sees himself as in charge, and Vera as a naïve, limited sidekick – too weak willed even to give up smoking without the help of a sham shaman.  Julien’s liking for her and derisive treatment of André wound the latter’s self-esteem, though as Vera’s switch from shrinking violet to social anarchist gathers momentum, she also begins to unsettle supposedly freer spirits – eventually Julien himself.  De Geer doesn’t present either protagonist as wholly in the right or wrong.  Vera’s new-found self-assertion may serve mansplainer André right but it’s hard not to sympathise with him as she continues to show him up – hard not to feel that what Vera does, even as it makes you smile, is disproportionately unkind.  André is more outrageous still:  scared stiff that Vera will ruin the crucial presentation, he crushes sleeping tablets into her nighttime glass of water.  Next morning, he puts the ‘Do not disturb’ sign on the hotel room door and goes downstairs to pitch alone.

André pays for that, of course.  After explaining that his partner is ill, he takes a leaf out of her book to give his pitch a personal touch and it goes down well.  Vera wakes up and joins the meeting – a spectre at the feast for André but she stays in the background.  It’s later in the day that she makes a scene – or scenes.  A French investor expresses interest in Epione but needs to catch a flight back to Paris soon; Lotta, who has arrived to support her protégés, secures a meeting with him; she and André hurriedly recruit another young woman to pose as Vera and rehearse her in a basic script.  As the foursome talk, the real Vera, posing as a waitress, comes to take their drinks order.  Later, after the announcement of the winning start-up (it’s the water woman’s), Vera plunges Julien’s closing address into darkness by messing around with the electrics in the room.  She pulls both these stunts in a disarmingly innocent manner – she doesn’t tell the Frenchman who she is – but The Hypnosis, meticulously realistic despite Vera’s oddball behaviour, is pushing it at this stage.  How does Vera manage not just to get hold of an apron but to carry on waitressing without bona fide hotel staff noticing?  Because, it seems, there aren’t any other staff.

The film recovers for a splendid finale – thanks to two related factors, for both of which De Geer has prepared the ground.  First, a narrative leitmotif is brought to a startlingly funny climax; second, the sustained hints that The Hypnosis is, as well as a satirical comedy, a romantic one, turn out to matter.  In a light-hearted early sequence at home, Vera and André pretend to be dogs.  You assume this is just something they occasionally do because it amuses them:  both actors are excellent woof-woofers but you don’t expect to see or hear any more of this routine.  In the hotel, however, one of Vera’s most attention-getting and controversial turns involves an imaginary chihuahua – she eventually yells at the hapless Karin for treading on the animal.  Once Shake Up is over, Vera and André return her mother’s car.  Eva, who is hosting a lunch for business colleagues, has heard from Julien about Vera’s misconduct; normal service in the balance of power between mother and daughter seems about to be restored.  Then André goes to the bathroom, where he takes a long hard look at himself in the mirror.  We learned from a conversation in the hotel that his parents trained in physical theatre:  their son now follows suit.  André returns to the dining room on all fours and barking.  He unzips his fly and pees profusely on Eva’s expensive-looking rug.

This moment would probably work as a comic highlight even if the canine motif didn’t connect with anything else in the film.  It’s something more because it does so connect.  In retrospect, Vera’s chihuahua act is not just part of her lady-of-misrule repertoire but illustrates the use of pretence to embarrass the pretenders of Shake Up.  It’s important that Vera’s domineering mother, like Julien, gets her comeuppance, even more important that André shows solidarity with Vera.  You’re now reminded of their joint dog impressions at nearly the start of the film – when they seemed to be happy together.  In spite of what happens between their characters in the course of the story, Asta Kamma August and Herbert Nordrum continue to suggest the couple’s persisting affection for each other.  When André, in desperation, phones the hypnotherapist from the hotel, demanding to know what she’s done to Vera, he receives a calm, measured reply:  he’s told that, while the therapy hasn’t transformed Vera, ‘compensating behaviour’ isn’t unusual in a therapee.  If that news has little effect on André, Julien’s treatment of Vera at the end of Shake Up certainly does:  when Julien refuses to let Vera appear in the concluding group photograph, André walks out in sympathy with her.  It’s a sign of things to come at her mother’s house.

The two main actors (she is Swedish, he Norwegian) are perfectly paired.  Asta Kamma August is extremely pretty but also unremarkable; she’s convincing as someone who’s both shy and capable of unsettling people.  Herbert Nordrum, very tall and with a long, droll face to match, is emotionally fine-tuned and has great comic timing.  The leads are well supported by the rest of the cast; the cinematography and the film’s score also play an important part.  Although Jonathan Bjerstedt’s images are full of light, they impart a rarefied quality to proceedings, especially in the glass palace-cum-prison of the Shake Up hotel.  Peder Kjellsby’s score, which Ernst De Geer uses judiciously, is playful but rather discomfiting.  That strain of The Hypnosis carries through to the very end, even though Vera and André are reconciled, as a rom-com couple should be.  After Vera has ushered her ‘bad dog’ out of the lunch party, the pair of them escape into woodland nearby.  The closing shot is of Vera, as she looks at André.  Her expression seems to acknowledge that he’s now surprised her, that perhaps they’re made for each other after all.  Yet the look on her face also seems to ask:  where do we go from here?

7 October 2023

[1] Afternote:  It was, in chronological order, the third of the ten films I saw at this year’s LFF and proved to be the most completely satisfying of any of them.