Hypnotisören

Lasse Hallström (2012)

Saturday evening, BBC 4, 9pm:  the now time-honoured hour of Scandi-noir.  The Hypnotist was screened in this slot last night.  The plot had plenty of improbabilities and loose ends but the main question in this viewer’s mind the morning after is why this became a cinema feature rather than just another television crime drama.  Perhaps only because the source material – a 2009 novel by Lars Kepler (the pen name of the husband-and-wife team of Alexander Ahndoril and Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril) – was such a bestseller?   It’s hard to see from this reasonably entertaining but very ordinary movie what else could explain its different screen status.  The Hypnotist contains lots of bloodshed but so do some of the television Scandi-noirs; unlike them, Lasse Hallström’s film has no scenes-of-a-sexual-nature.   Hallström himself is, of course, a well-known name in international cinema but his star has continued to fall in recent years.  His direction here isn’t obviously more imaginative than that of his TV Scandi-noir counterparts.

The two main men in The Hypnotist are the police detective Joona Linna (the resident protagonist of the Lars Kepler books) and the titular character, Erik Maria Bark, a controversial psychologist who is brought in to interview the sole survivor of knife attacks on members of a single family.  This survivor, a teenage boy called Josef, is himself seriously injured and comatose:  Erik’s hypnotist skills enable him to reach states of (un)consciousness that other interrogators can’t reach.  In Paolo Vacirca’s screenplay, these skills are, as you’d expect, deployed to bring about key movements in the story and forgotten about in the meantime, when conventional policing methods are more convenient to maintaining mystery and suspense.

It turns out that Josef is the killer of his adoptive family – father, mother and younger sister.  (An older sister, who’s been taken into care, has a lucky escape.)  Josef (Jonatan Bökman) is acting on the instructions of his biological mother Lydia (Anna Azcárate).  She, for good measure, abducts Benjamin (Oscar Pettersson), the young haemophiliac son of Erik (Mikael Persbrandt) and his artist wife Simone (Lena Olin).  It’s important that Simone is an artist:  once Erik has hypnotised her so that she can recall the abduction episode, Simone is able to draw a 100% lifelike portrait of the woman who injected her with a soporific drug before heading in the direction of Benjamin’s bedroom.   There’s a serious disconnect between Lydia’s motivation and the garishly gory murders she gets Josef to commit – or, at least, a serious lack of explanation of the latter’s psychology:  is he meant to be a homicidal maniac or just an appallingly obedient son?  There’s no explanation of plenty of other things in The Hypnotist:  how Lydia – sectioned for ten years and recently released back into the community – got herself a nursing job in a hospital; why Benjamin so much prefers his father to his mother, and so on.   The marital problems of these two vanish once they’ve served their atmospheric purpose.

The film is well acted and the emotional balance of the three central characters – Erik, Simone and Joona (Tobias Zilliacus) – is satisfying. Mikael Persbrandt is, as usual, a strong and persuasive presence.  Although the character’s mood swings are tiresome (actually you can see why Benjamin prefers his father), Lena Olin’s melancholy beauty keeps you interested in Simone.   Tobias Zilliacus, an actor new to me, is particularly good as Joona Linna.  The script verges on overstressing Joona’s geeky bachelordom but Zilliacus’s combination of ordinariness and wry charm is effective.  Without being dramatically workaholic, he convinces you how much Joona’s job matters to him.  This undemonstratively dogged detective is a welcome contrast to the flashier, bloodier elements of The Hypnotist.

2 July 2016