Trance Reviews
Badass Digest
TRANCE is neither righteously wanton nor deliberately abstract. It's merely half-baked storytelling made memorable by sheer ugliness.
ScreenRant
An overly-preposterous, neo-Noir crime thriller that unravels its central mystery - and then collapses when bringing deeper significance to the proceedings.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
Top CriticAnything goes, which may make all this great fun for the hallucinogenically inclined, but since nothing in these sequences has any lasting consequences, suspense is difficult to amplify.
FilmDrunk
Like a beautifully elaborate origami weave of story strands I didn't believe for even a single second.
Full Review
| Original Score: D
For fans of Danny Boyle, Trance is a dreamy disappointment but you can't help thinking that during the making of this film his mind was transfixed somewhere else in East London.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/10
The Popcorn Junkie
While Danny Boyle's frenetic direction excels, the film is always one long lost evil twin away from deteriorating to complete melodrama
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
ABC Radio (Australia)
If you were to tell me that Danny Boyle had told his long-standing First Assistant Director to go make a movie "in the style of Danny Boyle", and he had done so, and that the result had been TRANCE, I would've believed you. This is him slumming, badly.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
An insufferable cross between "Inception" and the twisty heist noir of Jean-Pierre Melville, "Trance" is a shapelessly propulsive mess of pop psychology and poor drama.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/10
What Culture
How much you'll bite down on Boyle's shtick will probably depend on your own suggestibility.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
Concrete Playground
Trance will divide people. A film like this really rests on the payoff of its twist, and the Trance twist is limp and signposted early on.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/10
sbs.com.au
Kinetic thriller about hypnosis is irritatingly befuddling, not mesmerising
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
The movie is never boring or uninteresting, but I viewed it from a detached perspective, unable to become involved because I didn't really care about any of the three main characters.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
For a while, "Trance" had me guessing, and more or less hooked. Then the violence, motivations, double-crosses and fantasy/reality tangles became tedious.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
East Bay Express
The best we can say about this is that it's better than Guy Ritchie.
Deadspin
"Shallow Grave" was one of Boyle's less stylish films, but it succeeded because of the interplay between its central characters. By comparison, "Trance" is simply shallow.
ComingSoon.net
From any other director, Trance would be just fine, but coming from Danny Boyle after such a long gap, it's hard not to be disappointed by what is clearly weaker material.
Full Review
| Original Score: 6/10
tonymacklin.net
Trance is an elaborate tease. Trance is more mindless than mind-bending.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/5
EntertainmentTell
Director Danny Boyle is clearly trying to make his "Inception," but instead he's made his "Vanilla Sky."
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
3AW
Director Danny Boyle goes off the boil with this meandering Inception wannabe... far from being a clever, tense heist-film-with-a-twist Trance is a laboured, over-stylised slice of pseudo-psychological babble. And it's kind of dull.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/5
Danny Boyle has great and plainly evident fun adding twists and curves and tunnels and endless style to his modern London noir Trance, but he makes so many left turns that the film turns in on itself rather than going anywhere.
