‘The Hypnosis’ Review: Norwegian Satire Skewers Start-Up Culture – Karlovy Vary Int’l Film Festival
deadline.comNorwegian cinema has been enjoying a moment lately, what with Joachim Trier’s crowdpleasing The Worst Person in the World pulling up to Drive My Car in the Oscar race and Kristoffer Borgli’s Sick of Me carving out a rep on the festival circuit.
The Hypnosis, Ernst de Geer’s feature debut, sits somewhere between the two of them, fashioning a fitfully funny relationship drama that tilts at some very modern windmills (coaches, gurus, new-tech start-ups, workshops that involve blue-sky thinking) within a framework similar to Kristian Levring’s 2008 Danish drama Fear Me Not, in which a man’s personality changes after he becomes addicted to an experimental drug.
The Hypnosis doesn’t quite follow that film’s melodramatic course, but there are similar thoughts raised about the human mind.
The two leads are André (Herbert Nordrum) and Vera (Asta Kamma August), a young middle-class couple who are launching a women’s wellness app called Epione, after the Greek goddess of health, based on Vera’s experiences growing up as a hemophiliac.
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