Hypnotic Parent Guide

Jenn (Kate Siegel) has been nursing a broken heart since a painful breakup with her fiancé, Brian (Jaime M. Callica). She’s now between jobs and is feeling discouraged – until her friend Gina (Lucie Guest) sets her up with her therapist. Dr. Collin Meade (Jason O’Mara), who recommends hypnotherapy. The sessions seem to help: Jenn finds a new job and starts working through some of her anxieties. But Dr. Meade is more than he appears, and his dark past is rapidly catching up with him.

About halfway through this movie, I began to wonder if I’d been hypnotized. My eyes were heavy, my thoughts were clouded, I started snoring…and that’s when I realized that this movie was so boring that I was just falling asleep. It’s all so blandly familiar that I was filled with an almost existential boredom and a powerful sense of déjà vu. It’s a lovely sleep aid, actually.

If you somehow manage to force yourself to pay attention (a harder task than you may expect), you’ll notice other issues. The dialogue alternates between boring and bad, but you’ll be too comatose to notice the bad parts. My biggest gripe is that the characters are patently stupid. Would you go and see a therapist who works out of a dark concrete office with menacing red lights? Would you let that person play around in your unconscious mind? The man lives like a Bond villain, yet you trust him enough to let him hypnotize you? The price for stupidity is high.

Despite the plot-mandated imbecility, Hypnotic doesn’t contain an overload of objectionable content. There is some brief violence, including a man being attacked with a knife, but there are no graphic displays of death or gore. There’s also shockingly little profanity, so much so that I assumed I’d zoned out and re-watched about fifteen minutes of the film – that’s time I’ll never get back. As usual, a lack of serious content problems does not make the film any more watchable.

This movie is allegedly under 90 minutes in length. As a dazzling example of what I assume to be temporal relativity, I would have sworn under oath that this movie was at least two hours long. There are better ways to lose this much time. Frankly, I wish I’d just gone with my initial impulse and taken a nap.