Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
Here’s a review someone sent in for TRAUMA, which is the new film from the director of MY LITTLE EYE:
Hi guys
Just been to see the newest British horror film 'Trauma' starring Colin Firth and, bizarrely, Mena Suvari. I haven't seen much about it on your site, and there are a lot of mind-bending-film fans out there so I thought I'd tell you what I thought of it. Feel free to edit as you wish.
Directed by Marc Evans, of quite decent My Little Eye notoriety, the film has Firth playing someone who has just lost their wife in a car accident and, at the start of the film, has just come out of a coma that resulted from the same crash. He awakes to also find that a famous music starlet he had been stalking has been killed (He's a bit of a weirdo here, to say the very least) and spends the film hallucinating, going through various nightmare sequences and interacting with his new landlady, played by Suvari.
The first problem with the film, of many, is that it plunges you into the story so quickly that you have pretty much no idea what is going on, and you'll continue with this mindset. It's not one of those films where the unanswered questions are just a little annoying either, by the end of the film my friend and I were literally the only people left in the cinema. It doesn't help that the film takes a while to distinguish between the dead wife and the dead singer, because for ages I assumed they were the same person, which caused no end of confusion. New questions are constantly being brought up, with clues that the dead wife may be alive, clues that some of the characters may not even exist and accusations that firth was in fact the person who killed the music star. It all builds up and since the film has a tendency to resolve all scenes with non-sensical nightmare scenes (These seem to have been slipped in at the last moment, as they never have any bearing on the story and Firth never seems to acknowledge that he is experiencing them) rather than anything satisfying, the frustration really builds.
I'm sure many people were intrigued by Firth going in a new, edgier direction with this film, as I was, but anyone who has been watching close enough will notice that Firth looks like his wife has just been brutally killed in every film he's in, I can't say his expression looks much different here. He is fairly convincing as someone going out of their mind I suppose, but we are given virtually no back story or information about him as a character, so just seeing him mope around some of the most overbearingly grimy sets you could ever imagine (London doesn't actually look like this you know) isn't too interesting. He mumbles and his dialogue is pretty bizarre, so he just looks like a drunken tramp really. Suvari, who I've really liked in Six Feet Under recently, is no good either, awkwardly smiling and delivering dialogue as if she is just reading it for the first time, although I suppose it can't help that her character is completely redundant and never even has minor involvement in the story. Naomie Harris, who was the strong female lead in 28 Days Later, is given little to do playing the dead wife, mainly appearing in choppily edited flashbacks and being seen walking through crowds by crazy-Firth, before finally turning up for one scene of howlingly bad exposition that beats out even Shyamalan's cameo in the Village.
From this you'd expect the film to lie on director Evans' shoulders, but unfortunately the film is a mess visually, and he appears only to be interested in the visuals, since he consatntly lets them overpower the already thinly concieved characters. Lots of time-distortion, blurring, flashy editing, camera-spinning, everything you'd expect to see in a lazy thriller is here in spades. Often the effect is terribly bad, such as when there are some heavily sped up shots of people going mad underneath the sheets of hospital beds which just looks and sounds like chickens that have had a cover thrown over them, it's just hilarious. the most over-used horror device in the film is ants. Firth keeps an ant farm as a hobby and as the film goes on the ants infest everything to an absurd degree. think of all the spiders in arachnaphobia, or better yet all of the worm things towards the end of that film squirm. It's quite effectively disgusting though, if insanely overdone.
In the end Trauma is even worse than one of those particularly confusing episodes of the X-Files. The cast seem helpless among this hyperactive, unimpressively surreal direction and attempts to involve the viewer in complete insanity and besides some atmospheric cinematography from John Mathieson and one really cool shot of a spider crawling out of someone's mouth there isn't really anything to recommend. Go and see Wicker Park if you want a twisty plot with a little bit of insanity, it's not making much money and is really quite good!
MaxH
Ooooof. Here’s a peek at some of what went on while making the film:
Dear Drew
NEW BEHIND-THE-SCENES FOOTAGE
Another gem from our 'During the making of...' series this time from British psychological thriller Trauma. We can't explain this and it totally spooked the cast and crew. Colin Firth shows you behind-the-scenes filming - weirdest thing is the forum at the end. Mena Suvari (from American Beauty) offers a surprise explanation although Colin Firth now refuses to talk about it.
Click Here To View
TRAUMA is open now in England, and I’m guessing we’ll see it here in the US sometime next year.
"Moriarty" out.
