Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Hypnotic’ on Netflix, a Feeble Thriller About an Evil Hypnotist and the Moron He Mesmerizes

Netflix’s annual scary movie barrage is about to tingle its last spine with Hypnotic, a psychological thriller starring Kate Siegel of Midnight Mass and The Haunting of Hill House fame. The streamer has yet to release a horror flick worth its weight in candy corn this Halloween season, a la 2020’s His House (although Fever Dream is pretty damn good), so maybe this story of a woman and her handsome hypnotherapist will be it. Or maybe it’ll just be another lame dud (he said, pretty much tipping his hand).

HYPNOTIC: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: An unnamed woman is freaking out. Is someone stalking her? She boards an elevator and she gets a call from an unknown number and, like a grade-A moron, she answers. Next thing you know, the walls are closing in, squishing her, and before we see anything gross or bloody, no eyeballs popping or bones being crushed or guts squidging out the edges, the movie cuts away — sorry, sickos! Next we meet Jenn the Vaguely Discontented (Siegel). She attends her bestie Gina’s (Lucie Guest) housewarming party, where she meets Dr. Meade (Jason O’Mara) and bumps into her ex-fiancee, Brian (Jaime M. Callica). Gina swears by Dr. Meade’s “therapy” — all kinds of good things happened to her since she started seeing him, so maybe if Jenn the Vaguely Discontented made an appointment, she’d be Less Vaguely Discontented than before.

Wait, isn’t hanging out at your therapy patient’s social gathering in order to acquire new patients kind of strange? Yes, and the script even addresses it, with a line of dialogue you’ll want to punt into orbit. Anyway, Jenn the Vaguely Discontented winds up going home and sleeping with Brian, and then going to see Dr. Meade, which requires walking down a long, ominous hallway and entering his HYPNOCHAMBER, decorated with red, triangle-shaped lights and a towering wall full of geometric art, which is more formally known as Spider-Man Villain Decor. None of this fazes poor Jenn, who tells the doc that she’s unemployed, and depressed because she split with Brian in the wake of their child being stillborn, a revelation rendering her slightly less vague in her vague discontent.

So she lets Dr. Mezmero fire up his pulsing strobe lights and put her under. She wakes up and even though it seemed like the blink of an eye, an hour passed. Unlike the rest of us, Jenn questions none of this. Whatever the hell happened must have worked because three months go by and she gets a new job and things are starting to look up. So she works and meets someone new and has a family and is no longer discontent, and lives happily ever after. No! To the surprise of absolutely no one, Mezmero’s been gamboling through Jenn’s subconscious, flipping switches and installing new software, like a diabolical fiend! Jenn starts doing some movie-plot math, piecing together what happened during her lost-time blackouts, and decides she needs to Google the good doctor, then call a detective (Dule Hill) for some assistance. And hey, guess what, Mezmero has a suspicious past, revealed when the cop spills all kinds of information to a civilian he just met, which is when the movie only begins to stretch credibility like yoga pants on a hippopotamus.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: I dunno, Stir of Echoes and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, I guess? Hypnosis sucks enough for us to wish the cast had performed in a state of hypnosis, a la Werner Herzog’s Heart of Glass, just to spice things up.

Performance Worth Watching: The performances here are so uniformly boring, highlighting one of them is like picking a shade of beige for the hallway from six dozen options in the paint aisle at Home Depot.

Memorable Dialogue: UNKNOWN CALLER: “Jennifer. Carry the fire.”

Sex and Skin: None. This is a contender for the least-sexy psychological thriller in the history of film and television.

Our Take: Hypnotic’s ability to be very silly without being particularly entertaining is quite a remarkable achievement. Directors Matt Angel and Suzanne Coote maybe stir up a light whiff of a Hitchcockism or two, but the plot, dialogue, characters, score and cinematography couldn’t be more off-the-rack if you bought them at Target. This is one of those everything-is-a-plot-device, waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop, just-get-it-over-with anti-suspenseful movies populated by only the dimmest bulbs of characters who exist to fulfill a series of stock thrillerisms cribbed from countless forgettable basic-cable movies. The idea that a male doctor would invade a woman’s mind in order to manipulate her has psychosexual connotations, but the movie shows no willingness for provocation — it’d rather patronize us and let us think we’re smart for predicting its every lame, halfhearted twist and turn.

It’s hard to root for a protagonist who walks headlong into the villain’s lair, ignores all the screaming neon warning signs and hands over the keys to her noggin. Will Jenn learn a lesson about mind over matter, or at least never to trust doctors in offices with major David Lynch vibes? Who cares. For a movie about the Power of the Subconscious, Hypnotic sure is empty-headed. Searching beyond basic plot execution for deeper meaning is like psychoanalyzing a stuffed animal — there’s nothing between its ears but fluff.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Finding anything entertaining here is like getting the hippo to do downward facing dog.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Hypnotic on Netflix