Trauma
Trauma
| 17 September 2004 (USA)
Trauma Trailers

Awaking from a coma to discover his wife has been killed in a car accident, Ben's world may as well have come to an end. A few weeks later, Ben's out of hospital and, attempting to start a new life, he moves home and is befriended by a beautiful young neighbour Charlotte. His life may be turning around but all is not what it seems and, haunted by visions of his dead wife, Ben starts to lose his grip on reality.

Reviews
Alicia

I love this movie so much

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BeSummers

Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

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Murphy Howard

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

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Bea Swanson

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

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Chrysanthepop

Marc Evans 'Trauma' may have been a little too much for some people to take in. I admit that it is confusing at times but what I liked about it is that it's the kind of film that's open to interpretation and there is no real right or wrong answer because many possibilities are plausible. What really happened? How much of it was a fabrication of Ben's tortured mind? Evans makes very efficient use of the budget. 'Trauma' doesn't have any lavish sets or expensive special effects which is just as well because it looks authentic the way it is. With skilled camera-work and an inventive setting that looks raw, the film manages to contain and maintain a very tense and chaotic atmosphere. Colin Firth does a stupendous job in one of his most complex roles as the tormented Ben who's endured losing his parents, Aunt Charlotte, failing art school, getting fired, a failed marriage and then is led to believe that he's responsible for his wife's death. Mena Suvari is quite likable. 'Trauma' clearly isn't made for everyone but it's definitely a movie that one will be thinking about (and perhaps discussing) after the closing credits have rolled. On an additional note, I liked and appreciated that the ants and their stunt doubles were credited during the end credits.

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MBunge

You're always hoping for something good. Whether it's a movie or a song or a plate of spaghetti, you're always hoping it'll be satisfying or fulfilling. That doesn't always happen, of course, but even when things aren't good, they can still be enjoyable. And not just in a Mystery Science Theater 3000 "Let's make fun of how bad it is" way. Sometimes a failed attempt can be more entertaining than a seamless success.Trauma isn't good, but it also isn't bad. Trauma just…isn't.The movie starts out with Ben (Colin Firth) apparently losing his wife in an auto accident that throws him into a coma. He emerges from the coma to find the rest of the world mourning the death of a famous pop singer, leaving him to grieve while surrounded by indifferent grief. That's not an unpromising beginning for a story but it's followed by a whole lot of nothing. I'd almost defy anyone to watch the first half of this film and try to figure out what it's about. There are moments in the first half of Trauma when reality starts to seem unreal to Ben, but those moments don't relate to anything or signify anything or make any sort of point.Things do start to happen in the second half of the film, yet happen is all that they do. Telling a story is like building a chair. There is an almost unlimited number of ways to do it, but some of those ways work a lot better than others. I f a story starts at point A and A leads you to B and A and B flow into C and all three propel you into D and so on and so forth, that's one of the best ways to tell a story. That's the way most stories are told. Folks have been tinkering with that approach, trying to find different ways of getting from A to B to C to D. But whether they go from A to D or D to A or C to X to Q, most good stories start in one place and build a road that takes you to a different place.Trauma is uninterested in building that road. There's no sense that things are unfolding in Ben's life in any particular direction or for any particular purpose. When the film starts to upend Ben's view of reality, it doesn't mean anything to the audience because the revealed truth doesn't alter or have any connection to what Ben and the audience thought was the truth before. This movie is like a 90 minute long, bad twist ending. A good twist ending makes you look at what came before it in a different way. A bad twist ending tells you all the stuff you've been watching, didn't actually happen that way.For all that, though, if you really liked Colin Firth in some of his more high profile roles as the repressed Englishman that hopelessly romantic women eventually realize they should be with, you might enjoy watching give a completely different performance. Firth's Ben is a man descending into madness in a decidedly untheatric fashion. He's not terribly interesting on his own, but it's certainly not the standard "sanity slipping away" acting role. Mena Suvari is also quite lovely and manages to make a shallow character into a real person.This is a British film and like a lot of other British movies, it's an odd visual mix. Modern British cinema, at least in my somewhat limited experience, mixes very ordinary and pedestrian visuals with strikingly artistic images. Sometimes that can be quite compelling and sometimes that doesn't work at all, like when Trauma suddenly lapses into a scene that is a blatant rip-off of the movie Jacob's Ladder.All in all, I can't say that Trauma is a bad movie. It's just that it never amounts to anything…and I'm not sure the filmmakers even wanted it to be anything.

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patrick powell

Trauma is a rather curious film which promises a great deal, seems to deliver, but which, on reflection, doesn't really deliver at all. In a nutshell, Colin Firth is the husband who had a crash in which his wife apparently dies, and who can't come to terms with her death. The backdrop to this personal tragedy is the mystery of the murder of a pop star who was beaten up, stabbed and Lord knows what else, and whose body is found in a canal in East London. There is, at first, no apparent link between that murder and the apparent death of Colin Firth's wife, but slowly links seem to be made, and by and by it is suggested that it seems our Colin might well have done the deed. Apparently. And the words 'apparent' and 'apparently' are rather apt here, because nothing is quite as it seems. Colin, lucky chap, is adopted by pert Charlotte, played by Mena Suvari, who is the landlord's daughter and who tells Colin that she is keeping an eye on the place, a former hospital which is - again apparently - being converted into East London yuppie apartments. (Incidentally, no other tenants are ever seen and nor is there any evidence that building work is ongoing. The old hospital resembles both an abandoned building site and a skip.) And the impression is also given that Charlotte merely the figment of grief-stricken Colin's imagination. And so on. It is, in fact, rather futile to embellish on that resume, because much of it is irrelevant. Why, for example, the emphasis on Colin's near-obsession with ants? Well, the simple answer is that such an inexplicable obsession plays rather well in a horror film. Why the suggestion that much of what is happening is all in Colin's imagination? And how to explain Charlotte's apparent - that word again - naivety? Anyone over the age of 16 who has spent more than a week in any city will know that such trust as she demonstrates is lethal - and naturally she ends up dead. Then there's the slightly spooky janitor who had previously worked in the hospital before conversion work started and who has a thing about the hospital morgue in the basement. What is his role? Well, it is simply to be the film's slightly spooky janitor, because such characters are never out of place in a horror film. There is, however, far, far less to him than meets the eye. The odd thing is that while writing this I'm feeling ever so slightly guilty, rather like the guilt you feel after admitting that the ugly sister you're rather fond of is really no looker. You see, although from the off Trauma is rather baffling, it has the knack of drawing you in, you go with it, you are intrigued as to where it will all end. And that means Trauma has already achieved a lot, lot more than any number of oh-so-formulaic Hollywood schlock on far bigger budgets - you know the kind of thing: I Saw You Scream Last Summer VI. In fact, despite my carping, Trauma can more than hold its own. Its difficulty is, I think, that it sets itself higher standards, and although it achieves far more than the formula stuff, it doesn't quite get to where it wanted to. I am prepared to accept that it was filmed on a shoestring and on location, but that is no criticism. Clever cinematography makes a virtue of the fact that the only set the producers could come up with was the old hospital being converted into yuppie flats, and that cleverness with using limited resources also means that it looks a lot more expensive than I'm sure it actually cost. Elsewhere in reviews of this film you'll get the usual IMDb extremes from this being quite possibly the best horror film ever made to lamentations that the viewer spent more than a milli-second of rubbish such as this. One reviewer even goes as far as to claim that Trauma is definitive proof that we Brits simply can't make horror films. But ignore both extremes, for despite its faults, its illogicalities, its short-changing in the facts department and a rather over-wrought denouement, Trauma is a lot better than many of its Yankee rivals. But it isn't quite as good as it might have been. You'll only be really disappointed if you go along hoping for the usual expensive, glossy dross which Hollywood can turn out by the mile. It is a lot better than that.

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mario_c

Trauma is psychotic thriller that grabs you in suspense and mystery until the end. It's about paranoia, obsession and loneliness, and its result is a complex mix of thoughts, images, illusions, sounds, nightmares and negation of reality!The plot is a bit complex to follow, because it has some twists, but it all begins with a guy in a Hospital awaken from a coma. All he knows, all he can remember, is that he had a car crash, his wife died in the accident and he was the one who was driving when the car crashed. So he feels angry with himself and guilty about his wife's death. But did really things happen as he thinks they did? At the same time the TV news are constantly relating the death of a star singer who was brutally murdered a few days ago. Is there any connection between these two deaths? Step by step we start discovering that this guy is just a bit paranoid and that something is not alright!Trauma is intense; it has mystery, suspense, action, complex plot, it has all ingredients to be a great thriller flick. It has also a good acting (not superb, but good enough, especially from the leading actor, Colin Firth, which plays the main character: Ben), and some good visual effects too. We can watch them especially in the nightmares/paranoia scenes.But I must say the end disappointed me a little bit, because by the rhythm the movie was going I was expecting a much more intense ending. Even so, it was a great thriller flick, one that makes you think, and one in which things are not as they seem they are at the first sight!

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