2024-09-20 11:18:30
Vera describes how she got her period for the first time at the age of eleven. The heroine of the Swedish film Hypnosis is already in her thirties, she clearly confides her experience to the camera, and the viewer feels from the beginning that her speech mixes authenticity with a carefully guarded way of presentation.
The debut of the thirty-five-year-old director Ernst De Geer can confidently be classified as a Scandinavian prototype, which masterfully draws the audience into a carousel of embarrassment and socially borderline situations. Czech cinemas are screening the new movie from Thursday.
Vera and André are thirtysomethings who not only live but also work together. They are developing an application to monitor women’s reproductive health, especially in those areas of the world where it is still taboo to talk about the subject.
But as it turns out over time, the initial story about the enormously strong first menstruation and floods of blood, potentially threatening a person’s life, is fictional. And De Geer’s entire film revolves around the fake authenticity game in the start-up world. The sarcastic criticism of this environment for the production of stories, which then make it possible to “consume the products” with a better feeling, is far from the only motive.
Hypnosis was performed for the first time in the main competition of the Karlovy Vary festival, where André’s actor Herbert Nordrum won an award for the role. Now the film has gone to regular cinema distribution, among other things, as a proof of the very decent quality of this year’s show. It resembles the works of more famous Nordic directors such as Ruben Ostlünd, a two-time winner of the Palme d’Or from the Cannes festival, or in places the work of Lars von Trier.
It begins as a light-hearted study of a relationship on the brink of crisis. Nervous and insecure, André is worried about how he and his start-up Epione will fare in the competition they entered. Right in the opening scene, when Vera confides in the camera about the alleged experience, he doubts how his partner perceives the presentation.
They live together and develop the app. Asta Kamma August as Vera and Herbert Nordrum as André. | Photo: Jonathan Bjerstedt
Nervousness builds as soon as the couple arrives at the competition itself, where they have to present their start-up stories and ideally also sell them to investors.
The reason for André’s insecurity does not only stem from his nature. The fact that Vera underwent a hypnotic session just before that, which was supposed to get rid of her addiction to cigarettes, contributes significantly to them. Instead, however, the therapy led to her awakening her “true self” and freeing herself from the shackles of social convention.
It sounds lofty, but the result doesn’t look like any great victory. And so during the competition, the heroine turns into an unpredictable force, who unceremoniously takes a drink from behind the bar without the waiter’s permission, at other times surprises the surroundings with her endless jokes with a fictitious chihuahua, which escalate from innocent fun into open conflict.
The director drives the protagonists into a situation where the viewer does not have the opportunity to decide for whom and whether they feel empathy for anyone at all.
Vera behaves completely non-standardly, at the same time her ability to derail people does not lead to any comic relief, or even to the highlighting of free-spiritedness and authenticity, which would stand in contrast to the hypocritical environment of “better” people around the startup business.
Asta Kamma August as Vera awakens to her “true self” as a result of a hypnotic session. | Photo: Jonathan Bjerstedt
That the film aptly portrays the pretense and insufferable mannerisms at the core of the cynical businessmen throughout does not mean that it evokes sympathy for the central pair.
On the contrary, the creators work cleverly with the fact that André may seem like the worse one, because he quite consciously wanted to lie to Vera and the others in order to save her collapsing presentation, but in the end Vera exposes the environment and the audience to those really unpleasant and uncomfortable moments.
At the same time, Hypnosis is very subtle in how it reveals the rotten background under the shiny facade, which is a favorite theme of many Scandinavian filmmakers. Not all of the author’s lessons in creating embarrassment come out 100%, sometimes you can feel a slight spasm, but the funny moments benefit from the fact that they are quite ordinary situations – without much extravagance. Authors don’t have to go to great lengths to make viewers squirm in their seats.
Sometimes it’s enough for a character to enter a room where they seem unwelcome, or at least uninvited – and now it’s full, there’s not an empty chair left.
For a debutante, Ernst De Geer manages similar moments very convincingly and creates tension from small casual conversations. The few moments when he pushes and lets the heroes really cross the “rubicon” of social norms stand out all the more.
Hypnosis lacks the swing, elegance and ability to precisely oscillate between comedy and suffocating embarrassment of Toni Erdmann’s film, which charmed the audience at the Cannes festival in 2016, or the intensity and radicality of Trier’s Idiots, which break social norms with much more brazenness.
De Greer’s debut may be a more low-key relative of its more famous predecessors, yet it manages to create scenes that stick in the memory just as much. And it’s also – after the Coen brothers’ Big Lebowski – the second best film where the “f*cking carpet” plays a vital role. Which is not enough for a debut.
Film
Hypnosis
Directed by: Ernst De Geer
Artcam Films, Czech premiere on September 12.