Trauma: Mark's Take
01/04/2005 . Source: Mark R. Leeper 

A man awakes from a coma to find his world changed and things no longer making sense. A film this unpleasant should at least be absorbing. This one is a hard film to get into and it really does not reward that effort.

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TRAUMA offers a lot of mood and a lot of nightmarish images. But is there a story really worth telling? Is there a story there at all? (To tell some of what is wrong would spoil the plot, so I will explain in an afterward flagged by spoiler warnings.) This story is almost as unpleasant to watch as it would have been in real life.

Ben (played by Colin Firth) is in an automobile accident and the world seems to have changed for him. He feels disoriented and out of place, problems that his psychiatrist seems to make only worse. He is seeing a strange figure in a parka. His interest in ants and spiders turns into a laxness and at odd moments we see them crawling on his body. He meets and befriends a neighbor Charlotte (Mena Suvari) and she takes him to a psychic who claims that his wife is not dead.

The death of his wife seems to parallel the murder of a famous rock star and in odd ways it seems to blend into it. Ben retreats deeper and deeper into his own thoughts. There are lots of little clues as to what is happening but try as the viewer might they do not add up. The spiders, the ants, the shoes, the parka, what does it all mean?

Marc Evans directs this psychological drama from a screenplay by Richard Smith. It is unique in more ways than one including being the only film I have ever seen that individually credits featured ants. The film tries that hard to be weird. It succeeds at that, but I require more from a film. People who do not like ants and spiders may want to avoid this film. For some originality I will give this film a 0 on the -4 to +4 scale or 4/10.

Major Spoiler Alert...

The story that I saw is not internally consistent. Much of it hinges on the question of whether Elisa was in the car at the time of the crash. Assuming the car was not vaporized (and it wasn't) the investigating police would know how many people from the car were killed in the crash. If the police knew, then Ben would have known unless this is one more film that turns out to be all in someone's head.

Discussing the film I voiced this opinion and another viewer said that we were really seeing just what was in a psychotic's mind. That does seem to be the only consistent explanation, but if the only explanation that makes the content of the film possible is one that says that in this film virtually anything could have happened the filmmaker has broken faith with the audience.

If the filmmaker is going to expect that the audience is going to invest logical consideration of his images, he has a responsibility to make sure those images have some logical meaning. They should not turn out to be the result of a dream or psychosis in which anything could happen and nothing is known.

Rating: 0 (-4 to +4) or 4/10

Mark R. Leeper

Copyright 2005 Mark R. Leeper