Hypnotic

From Mental Block
Hypnotic is a 2021 American thriller film directed by Matt Angel and Suzanne Coote, written by Richard D'Ovidio and starring Kate Siegel, Jason O'Mara, and Dulé Hill. It was released on October 27, 2021, by Netflix.

Plot[edit | edit source]

In the prologue, a woman (Stephanie Cudmore) receives a phone call just before stepping into an elevator. Once inside, the walls of the elevator seem to close in on her until she is crushed to death, but her intact body is later found inside the perfectly normal elevator. We later learn that she was hypnotized into seeing the walls crush her, and died of fright.

Jenn (Siegel) and her friend Gina (Lucie Guest) attend a party where Jenn meets Dr. Meade (Mara), a hypnotherapist. Also at the party is Brian (Hill), Jenn's ex; their relationship status is over but not quite over, and Jenn seeks Dr. Meade's help in the matter. She agrees to be hypnotized as part of the therapy. Unfortunately for Jenn, Dr. Meade has begun to fall in love with her, seeing her as a near-enough lookalike for his dead wife. To get rid of Brian, Dr. Meade encourages Jenn to invite him over for a dinner, but then hypnotizes her over the phone and programs her to add an ingredient to the dinner that will trigger a severe allergic reaction. Jenn awakens from a trance to find Brian collapsed in the bathroom; she rushes him to the hospital.

Jenn and Gina become suspicious of Dr. Meade. Unfortunately for Gina, she is also Meade's patient and confesses to Jenn that she allowed him to hypnotize her as well. Sure enough, Dr. Meade calls Gina while she is driving and uses a trigger phrase to make her think that there is a tarantula crawling on her. Gina, deathly afraid of spiders, panics and gets into a fatal accident.

Gina's death leads Jenn to confront Dr. Meade. She confronts him in his office, intending to have Detective Rawley (Jaime Callica) burst in to arrest him, but she discovers that Meade is one step ahead of her- he hypnotized her into believing that she was still in his office, when in fact he has taken her out into the coutnryside. Rawley finds nothing but an empty office and no Jenn.

However, Jenn has her own card to play. Armed with another post-hypnotic suggestion given to her by Dr. Graham (Tanja Dixon-Warren), an ethical hypnotherapist, Jenn is able to resist Meade's control over her enough to summon the police and to shoot and kill Meade.

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