Director – Marc Evans, Screenplay – Richard Smith, Producers – Nicky Kentish Barnes & Jonathan Cavendish, Photography – John Mathieson, Music – Alex Heffes, Additional Music – The Boilerhouse Boys, Special Effects Supervisor – Yves de Bono, Production Design – Crispian Sallis. Production Company – First Choice Films/Isle of Man Film Limited/Little Bird Productions/Ministry of Fear.
Cast
Colin Firth (Ben), Mena Suvari (Charlotte), Naomie Harris (Elisa), Tommy Flanagan (Tommy), Kenneth Cranham (D.C. Jackson), Sean Harris (Roland), Brenda Fricker (Petra), Kananu Kirimi (Carrie), Alison David (Lauren Parris), Liam Reilly (Gareth Cawood)
Plot
In London, Ben is recovering from a car accident that killed his wife Elisa. He moves into a new apartment. There he forms an attachment to Charlotte, the landlord who lives opposite. At the same time, Ben starts experiencing hallucinations and memory lapses that make him think that maybe Elisa is still alive. In the news is the death of popular singer Lauren Parris, who died not far away from the apartment. Ben obsessively keeps news clippings of Lauren. However, as Ben’s memories of Elisa start to blur together with Lauren, he begins to wonder if he was not connected to Lauren’s death.
Welsh-born director Marc Evans first appeared working in British tv. His works there include the clairvoyance mini-series The Gift (1990), before going onto films such as Arthur’s Departure (1994) about time travellers attempting to snatch King Arthur; Resurrection Man (1998) about a gang of sadistic thugs conducting a reign of terror in Belfast; the undeniably effective reality tv horror film My Little Eye (2002); and subsequently the non-genre likes of Snow Cake (2006), Patagonia (2010) and Hunky Dory (2011). Trauma comes with an impressive line-up of British acting talent and was released by BBC Films.
The film starts with Colin Firth being released from hospital and taking a new apartment, following the death of his wife (Naomie Harris) in a car crash. It is not long into Trauma before strange things start happening. We meet odd characters like Sean Harris’s janitor who lurks around the old morgue in the basement. Brenda Fricker turns up as a medium offering to put people in contact with the dead and seems to sense things about Colin. Mena Suvari plays a charming neighbour/landlord and even potential love interest. Lurking in the background is the mystery all over the news and papers about a murdered singer. All of this is not unakin to a film like Jacob’s Ladder (1990) where dark and mysterious things are going on and everything has a deeper symbolic function, or perhaps even a Don’t Look Now (1973) where everything symbolically maps over onto some other aspect of the film.
By mid-film, we are more in the neighbourhood of one of Pål Sletaune’s films like Next Door (2005) and Babycall (2011), both of which are set in apartments where what is real is in a constant bewildering state of flux, or even something of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965), Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf (1968) and David Cronenberg’s Spider (2002) where we are not clear what takes place in the protagonist’s mind and what is real.
Colin Firth and Mena Suvari
Everything that we assume is going on is in a state of shifting of reality. Colin Firth moves into an apartment, which seems suspiciously close to a location where a popular singer was murdered, although at a later point we are confusingly told he is living in a hospital. The big charcoal mural he made of Naomie Harris on the wall later out to be just an ugly black stain. He befriends Mena Suvari but then she might not even be there – as they sit together, she seems to mimic the pose of Colin and wife Naomi Harris in his photo album. Photos of the murdered girl in magazines seem to blur into being Naomie.
The biggest surprise [PLOT SPOILERS] comes when Colin Firth is told by Naomi Harris’s sister (Kananu Kirimi) to stop his obsession over Naomie and then Naomie herself turns up at the apartment to tell him to leave her alone and we find that she is not dead after all, that they have merely separated. The film reaches an end with us not quite sure what did transpire with Colin Firth seemingly locked up in a hospital ward (it is not clear if it is a psych ward or not) and much of what is seen all being possibly imagined. Most unsettlingly, Mena Suvari’s fate is left unclear.
This was one of several films called Trauma, including within genre material also the likes of the psycho-thriller Trauma (1962) and Dario Argento’s Trauma (1993). This is also unrelated to and should not be confused with Trauma (2018), the later British thriller tv mini-series of the same name that Marc Evans also directed.
