Danny Boyle hasn’t made a film in over two years, but that’s all about to change with Trance, a “seductive” thriller starring James McAvoy and Rosario Dawson that already has a March release date in the U.K.
While the synopsis suggests McAvoy is the film’s star, in an interview with USA Today, Boyle said of Trance: “I wanted to do an updated noir, give it a contemporary spin in terms of emotion. Noir is usually cold. I wanted it to be more emotionally charged. It’s the first time I put a woman at the heart of a movie.”
Fine art auctioneer Simon (McAvoy), in league with a gang led by underworld boss Franck (Vincent Cassel), plots the audacious theft of a masterpiece by Goya from a major public auction. When Simon double-crosses the gang during the robbery, Franck retaliates violently and knocks him unconscious. In the aftermath of the heist, Simon sticks stubbornly – and perhaps shrewdly – to his claim that the violent trauma has left him with no memory of where he stashed the artwork.
Unable to coerce the painting’s location from Simon, Franck and his associates reluctantly join forces with a charismatic hypnotherapist (Dawson) in a bid to get him to talk. But as they journey deeper into Simon’s jumbled psyche the boundaries between reality and hypnotic suggestion begin to blur and the stakes rise faster and far more dangerously than any of the players could have anticipated.
While the synopsis sounds more like a conventional, old-fashioned genre film, Boyle tells USA Today: “It begins like that. But it takes the idea of a stolen painting and develops into something sleeker and more psychological, with twists and turns.”
Set for a March 27, 2013 release in the U.K., there is not release date scheduled stateside, although we can probably expect to see it sometime in 2013.