Movie Review: HYPNOTICA (aka UNHINGED)

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: March 31st, 2023 / 01:26 AM

HYPNOTICA movie poster | ©2023 Terror Films

Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Adam Johnson, Tim Torre, Taylor Foster, Marisa Echeverria
Writer: A.T. Sharma
Director: A.T. Sharma
Distributor: Terror Films
Release Date: March 31, 2023 (digital)

HYPNOTICA opens with the supertitle: “The following is based on actual case studies.” This is broadly true, in the sense that psychiatrists treat patients for mental health issues.

Oliver Reese (Adam Johnson) tells us in voiceover that, “I was going to Hell.” He then recites part of W.B. Yeats’s poem “The Stolen Child,” but substitutes “spirit” for “faery.”

In fact, Oliver is going to see his psychiatrist, Mason Santino (Tim Torre). Oliver has brought a briefcase to the session. He teases that he’s brought an instrument of death, then pulls out a flute. But we see there’s a handgun in there as well.

Mason isn’t sure what to do for Oliver, who is having serious problems with both his job and his family life. Instead of finding ways for Oliver to cope with these obviously major stressors, Mason thinks the key to help may lie in helping his patient remember the past.

Oliver, it turns out, has virtually no memories prior to when he was twelve years old and his father left the family. But when Mason hypnotizes Oliver, what comes forth is memories of previous lives. Mason thinks it’s either an act or a case of confusing fiction (things Oliver has read) with recollection. Mason’s colleague, Dr. Schlesinger (Marisa Echeverria), is more open to the possibility that some sort of reincarnation is at work.

Meanwhile, we learn in a phone conversation between Mason’s wife Cassie (Taylor Foster) and his mother that he comes from a family of seers. Mason has left all that behind to pursue science.

Writer/director A.T. Sharma creates a good sense of tension in a number of scenes. He also comes up with an evocative device to explore Oliver’s memories under hypnosis, giving us the sounds but not the visuals of what is being described.

Sharma gets a particularly effective performance from Johnson, who is able to make Oliver convincingly hearty, menacing and forlorn. Torre does well as the understandably confused and alarmed clinician.

But Sharma seems to feel that giving Mason a backstory rooted in the occult explains more than it does. Having Mason not deal with it directly (what’s his relationship like with his mother, anyway?) seems like a cheat.

As hallucinations and nightmares increase, it becomes less rather than more evident what we’re meant to dread. Everything is so oblique that when the big twist comes, it doesn’t have the intended impact. In order to subvert expectations, there needs to be something we were expecting in the first place.

HYPNOTICA ends with a postscript that puts a whole new light on what we’ve watched. It may be enlightening to look up the person who is credited with the quote. It’s hard to guess whether many people will take this seriously.

For those who feel that religion is already impacting actual medical care too much already, and that this trend ought not to be validated, even in something as fanciful as HYPNOTICA, the postscript is liable to prove alienating.

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