TRAUMA

Directed by: Marc Evans Produced by: Nicky Kentish Barnes Jonathan Cavendish

Written by:

Richard Smith

Starring: Colin Firth Mena Suvari Naomie Harris Sean Harris Neil Edmon

Storyline
Ben wakes from a coma after a car crash to discover that his wife, Elisa, was killed in the accident. The outside world, meanwhile, is obsessed with the murder of pop star Lauren Parris, a death that receives saturation coverage in the media. Attempting to start a fresh life, Ben moves into a new flat and begins to see the psychiatrist who helped him after the death of his parents. Elisas family are blanking but his old friend Tommy gives him some restoration work. HIs neighbour Charlotte is also sympathetic, taking Ben, who has been haunted by the image of his dead wife, along to a seance. A police inspector questions Ben about the Parris murder. It transpires Elisa was one of her dancers. Ben and Charlottte go to another seance. The medium tells Ben that his wife is still alive. Ben visits Elisas sister Carrie to tell her the news. Carrie tells Ben to leave her family alone. At a session with his shrink, Ben begins to suspect that he is losing his grip on reality and has invented Charlotte as a response to his grief. After spotting himself in the background of some newspaper photographs of Parris, Ben becomes obsessed that he had something to do with her murder but Carrie tells him that he was following Elisa, and that before the accident the couples marriage had broken down. Elisa turns up at Bens flat to tell him that she and her family pretended she died in the crash so that he would leave her alone. Ben resolves to confront his feelings about Charlotte. Deciding that she is a figment of his imagination, he kills her. The buildings caretaker finds her body and Ben is admitted to a psychiatric hospital.

Reaction
Edinburgh Evening News (Sept 16, 2004) - 1 of 5 stars There are few things more frustrating than horror movies that are ashamed of what they are. Trauma is being marketed as a horror movie, is directed by Marc Evans, who made the excellent serial killer-meets- Big Brother flick My Little Eye and is produced by a subsidiary of British company Little Bird, the Ministry Of Fear that has been set-up to produce horror movies. But its not a horror movie. Oh no. What is it then? Answers on a postcard to the usual address. Ben (Colin Firth) awakes from a coma to find that his wife Elisa has died in a car crash that may or may not have been his fault. Ben is grief-stricken, confused and after a few weeks in hospital attempts to rebuild his life by moving out of the marital home and into an apartment in a spooky converted hospital. Bad idea.

As is the casting of American Beautys Mena Suvari as the young woman Firth gets to reluctantly flirt with in his usual clipped, emotionally repressed manner. Firth wanders in and out of scenes looking perpetually confused, but it becomes apparent that Bens selective memory gaps are hiding a darker truth. Why do the police in the sinister form of Kenneth Cranham suspect him of complicity in his wifes death? Even more puzzlingly, why do they also seem to suspect him of the murder of the rather anonymous sounding pop star Lauren Paris? And while were about it, since when did the death of an R&B singer unite the nation in a display of bereavement not seen since Princess Diana died? If Samantha Mumba kicked the bucket would the entire country grind to a standstill? Evans handles the dislocating effects of grief very well in the early stages but it soon becomes obvious that the fractured narrative is hiding a "Big Twist" which youll guess an hour before its revealed. Trauma has all the hallmarks of a good, solid idea for a half-hour short that has been padded far beyond its natural length. Brenda Fricker and Scots actor Tommy Flanagan turn up in pointless roles that do nothing other than extend the running time. Once youve guessed the secret lurking behind Richard Smiths undercooked script, Evans approach becomes tiresome. It is like watching a bad magician continually misdirecting his audience so they wont see the trick coming.

Firth is so clenched hes positively constipated. Ben must have looked like a welcome change of pace for the actor but it looks increasingly like he simply cannot play anyone other than Colin Firth. At least hes consistent. Evans demonstrates hes capable of better things by playing with nightmarish imagery. Theres an effective, jerky, blurred, spook scare lifted from Jacobs Ladder and the escaped ants in Firths apartment recall the encroaching signs of mental disturbance in Polanskis Repulsion. Those films were horror movies though, Trauma thinks rather better of itself. It is a psychological thriller. However the psychology is banal and the thrills are few and far between.

The Scotsman (by Alastair McKay, Aug 20, 2004) Just a trick of the mind My Little Eye marked Evans out as a director with a mastery of mood and a command of fear. He also showed an understanding of the cinema experience: the film is nowhere near as effective on DVD. Trauma is two steps sideways. It has the same visual style, and it continues the directors fascination with the difference between perception and reality, but it swaps narrative coherence for a series of trick mirrors. The action takes place within the mind of Ben (Colin Firth), who has survived the car crash in which his wife died and awoken from a coma to discover that the country is in mourning for Lauren Parris, a pop star, who has been found murdered in a London canal. Benwhose mind flickers between flashback and nightmareis wracked with guilt and confusion. Was he to blame for his wifes death in the car crash? Was there some connection between him and the dead pop star? Who is the scary man in the snorkel parka who keeps appearing in the local market, like a Britpop version of the dwarf in the duffel coat in Dont Look Now? The opening scenes play around with the notion of the kind of communal grief that now attends high-profile deaths. The response to the pop stars murder is an outpouring of vague gloominess and petrol station bouquets, placing the event as a cross between the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and the murder of Jill Dando. As in My Little Eye, Evans seems to be criticising media-generated narratives. Ben observes the scenes of mass grieving on the television in his hospital ward, and wanders off in his gown, muttering "My wifes dead". The story unfolds according to changing perception of the central character. As Ben is suffering from a mix of amnesia and something approaching paranoid delusion, the inside of his mind is not a pleasant place to linger. We see him in therapy, angry and unable to grieve. There is talk of forbidden rooms, and everything is bathed in a cold blue light. He wanders along a derelict corridor whenboo!a spooky stranger

jumps out and says, with the vague threat of the caretaker of the abandoned gold mine in Scooby Doo: "Entrance to the old morgue". Yes, conveniently, Bens house is in a half-converted hospital. His neighbour across the hall is a moon-faced girl (Mena Suvari), who introduces herself in the manner of a Gold Blend advert. The moon-faced girl then takes him to see a medium, who tells him his wife isnt really dead. A detective (the splendid Kenneth Cranham) turns up, wondering where he was on the night of the pop stars murder. And so it goes. There is a nasty scene involving a spider, and several instances of the Ominous Train sound effect they use on EastEnders to signify Bad Things.

Channel Four (by Daniel Etherington) Ben (Firth) is not a happy chap. After coming out of coma, he blames himself for the death of his wife Elisa (Harris) in the accident. But his recovery process is confused by the fact that the entire nation is mourning the murder of a pop star, Lauren Parris. Ben himself is obsessing over Parris's death: he's compiling a scrapbook and has moved into a new apartment in a converted hospital near where her body was found in an east London canal. Despite being connected with the starhis wife was among her troupe of dancersBen also comes to the attention of the police, being interviewed by Inspector Jackson (Cranham) as a stalker and potential suspect. Ben really is addled. He thinks he sees something suspicious going on in the basement via CCTV ("the entrance to the old morgue"), he keeps seeing a figure in a snorkel parker (who the police are looking for), and he even believes he's seen Elisa. His feelings get even more mixed up when he meets Charlotte (Suvari), his "sort-of land lady". Not only are they attracted to each other but she takes him to gatherings hosted by a supposed psychic (Fricker). He's understandably freaked when she says "There's somebody in two minds here. So much death in this mind, so much death.... BenElisa hasn't passed over." What the devil is going on? Director Marc Evans, whose last film was the tense, innovative My Little Eye, doesn't make things easy for the viewer. His tendency toward shifting focus, almost subliminal glimpses, snippets of CCTV, and a whole gamut of tricky techniques all reflect Ben's post-traumatic disorientation, steeping the film with the protagonist's troubled sensibilities. Firth does an excellent job of providing a dishevelled focus for this intriguing little psychological thriller cum horror drama. It's also a credit to his emotive performancewhich dominates the filmthat you sympathise with Ben even when you feel you can't trust him. Thematically Trauma is also interesting, though not entirely successful. The conceit of the death a pop star moving an entire nation isn't credible, partly because

despite how much people are weaned on tabloid celebrity culture these daysthe notion of a British Madonna/Princess Di hybrid isn't entirely believable. It's a thoughtful comment on how we get caught up in the media's myth-making, and the displacement of emotions, but it's also a heavy-handed narrative device used to contrast the personal with the public, the real with the imagined etc. Evans and first time screenwriter Richard Smith also have something to say about survival guilt, about the formulation of personality (Ben has also been shaped by earlier traumas), as well as the failing of the health services. Ben is not just a man recovering from a coma who's grieving his wife, he's also mentally ill and needs support as such. But it seems unavailable, bar visits to a cryptic shrink. Melding psychological thriller elements with creepier aspects that may be supernatural, Trauma is in some ways as muddled as Ben himself. Although it has distinctions, it's also strangely familiarespecially in a scene that virtually recreates a famous sequence from Jacob's Ladder. Hitchcock and M Night Shyamalan are also definite frames of reference, amongst others. Evans is an adept director at creating atmosphere (ably assisted by Gladiator and Hannibal cinematographer John Mathieson) and disorientation. But the thriller and horror elements cancel each other out somewhat, so the intensity of the film is ultimately compromised by its slippery nature. Verdict: An intriguing but not entirely satisfying film, featuring an impressive turn by Colin Firth.