Here’s your first look at The Hypnosis, the debut feature from Swedish filmmaker Ernst De Geer, starring Herbert Nordrum (The Worst Person in the World) and Asta August (The Kingdom).
The pic debuts in Competition at this year’s Karlovy Vary Film Festival, with Paris-based company Totem Films handling sales. Scandinavian Film Distribution is the local distributor.
Story follows André (Nordrum) and Vera (August), a young entrepreneurial couple who have been offered the opportunity to pitch their female health app at a prestigious competition. Before the presentation, Vera tries hypnotherapy to quit smoking. From this point, her attitude changes and André starts to behave unexpectedly.
Screenplay is by De Geer and Danish writer Mads Stegger (Nach) and was produced by Mimmi Spång of Garagefilm International in co-production with Film I Väst AB, Mer Film AS, and Totem Atelier. The pic received support from the Swedish Film Institute, Norwegian Film Institute, Nordisk Film & TV Fond, Film i Väst, SVT, NRK, and YLE. Additional credits include music by Peder Kjellsby (Barn), cinematography by Jonathan Bjerstedt, and Robert Krantz on editing.
Nordrum is best known for his breakout role in Joachim Trier’s 2021 Cannes winner, The Worst Person in the World, while August, daughter of double Palme d’Or Danish filmmaker Bille August, has credits on projects like Lars von Trier’s The Kingdom and Amalie Næsby Fick’s Sex.
The Hypnosis will mark De Geer’s feature film debut. A native Swede, he studied directing at the Norwegian Film School. His graduation film, the Culture (2018), won prizes at several festivals, including Palm Springs and Premiers Plans. The short was also nominated for a Norwegian National Film Award.
De Geer shaped the film at a series of international workshops, including Les Arcs Coproduction Village 2020, Discovery GIFF 2020, and Wild Card Swedish Film Institute.
The synopsis of the new dark comedy from Swedish director Ernst De Geer sounds like it could have formed the basis of the sort of wacky Hollywood fare that might have starred Lily Tomlin back in the day. A young woman goes to a hypnotherapist seeking a cure for her smoking addiction, but the treatment comes with a side effect, namely that it also causes her to lose her social inhibitions. Zany complications ensue!
Fortunately, The Hypnosis (Hypnosen), receiving its world premiere at Karlovy Vary, has smarter things on its mind, which is not to say the film doesn’t feature broad-strokes humor. But it also offers knowing satirical commentary on conformity and relationships that benefits from razor-sharp comic dialogue and superb performances by its two leads.
The story revolves around romantic and professional partners Andre (Herbert Nordrum, from The Worst Person in the World) and Vera (Asta Kamma August). The couple enjoy a playful, loving relationship while attempting to get their start-up business, an app dealing with women’s health issues, off the ground. Before they are scheduled to participate in a national conference called “Shake Up,” in which businesspeople pitch their wares to potential investors, Vera decides to see a hypnotist for her smoking problem. “Isn’t that mumbo-jumbo?” a skeptical Andre asks.
The treatment seems to work and the pair head to the conference, where they unveil their pitch. A vivacious Vera turns out to be a hit with her part of the presentation, but the anxious Andre comes across, in the conference leader’s acerbic words, “like an amusement park of nervous gestures.”
Vera at first proves highly popular with their fellow attendees, while Andre is pointedly not even invited to a mixer. But her behavior becomes increasingly erratic, from pouring herself a beverage at the hotel bar and walking away without paying to pretending to have an invisible chihuahua. Andre gets more and more rattled about allowing her to take part in the upcoming presentation; he takes the drastic step of knocking her out with sleeping pills mixed in her drink so he can deliver it solo. Needless to say, things don’t go quite as planned, with the proceedings soon entering mildly farcical territory.
What gives the film its distinction is the clever screenplay by De Geer (making his feature directorial debut) and co-writer Mads Stegger, filled with sharp observational and character-driven humor that transcends the fairly conventional premise. By the time it offers a series of plot twists toward the end that shift our perception of what’s occurred, it becomes clear that the story is more concerned with the relationship between the two protagonists than its plot machinations.
August is terrific as the sunny, personable Vera, making us care for her character from beginning to end. Nordrum is equally compelling in what proves a tougher assignment, since his character often behaves in a questionable manner that tests our sympathies. But Andre’s anxiety and desperation ultimately become so relatable that we root for him despite the cringe factor. By the film’s conclusion he performs an outlandish act of redemption that justifies our faith and wouldn’t have seemed out of place in a dark Hal Ashby comedy from the ‘70s.
There are certain moviegoers who can face onscreen murders, maimings and the grisliest of mutilations and scarcely bat an eyelid, but who feel every cell in their body die a little whenever a character is rude in a restaurant. If you happen to suffer from this condition, consider yourself warned about Swedish director Ernst De Geer’s feature debut “The Hypnosis” — a witty, incisive satire on the modern obsession with self-actualization, which is also, to those of us with heightened sensitivity to social awkwardness, 98 masochistic minutes of second-hand squirm. Many’s the film offered up as evidence for Roger Ebert’s often quoted assertion that cinema is “a machine for creating empathy”; fewer are the titles, like this one, that make one question if that’s necessarily a good thing.
Vera (Asta Kamma August) is carefully rehearsing her English-language pitch opener for Epione, a noble-sounding app that does something or other regarding women’s health in developing countries. Her life and business partner André (Herbert Nordrum, last seen ecstatically blowing smoke into Renate Reinsve’s mouth in “The Worst Person in the World”) listens intently. Perhaps Vera’s tone is “too heavy?” His fears are quelled by pragmatic mentor Lotte (Andrea Edwards), who declares that the pair are ready for Shake Up, a weekend of workshops on which they’ve won a coveted slot. There, they will hone their pitch alongside several other hopeful do-gooder entrepreneurs (“Water! We need it! We drink it!” begins a typical rival schtick) before finally presenting it to potential investors.
Together, Vera and André seem the very model of idealistic-to-the-point-of-naive millennial optimism — an impression enhanced by DP Jonathan Bjerstedt’s crisp images, washed to laundry-freshness in cool Nordic light. But there’s one small thing. Vera is annoyed at herself for not being able to quit smoking and books a session with a hypnotherapist. She emerges still a smoker, but floating and serene and changed in ways that manifest at first as benign: heightened self-confidence when facing the backhanded sniping of her wealthy, well-connected mother; a sudden playfulness; even the timidity in her eyes is replaced by a more assertive, frank gaze.
At the chic hotel, during seminars and mixer events, Vera’s oddball energy gets her admiringly noticed by Julien (David Fukamachi Regnfors) the odiously self-regarding workshop guru. But for André, Vera 2.0 is an increasingly perplexing proposition, wrongfooting him during their joint presentations and behaving erratically in social situations where he is trying his painfully sincere best to fit in. Cue some of the most deliciously torturous scenes as André, whose mounting panic is perfectly underplayed by a terrific Nordrum, attempts to compensate for his girlfriend’s more lunatic excesses. One particular sequence, where he ingratiates himself into a dinner with the investors while perched on a chair that’s too high, is as wincingly accurate a portrait of failing to read the room as you could hope to witness.
That the script, co-written by De Geer and Mads Stegger, shifts focus from Vera to André might be an issue if both actors weren’t so in concert, even when showing the schism that Vera’s epiphany opens up between them. August never softens Vera’s swerve into unpredictability; at times she is almost monstrous in her disregard for the humiliations she’s casually visiting on her hapless partner. But she also retreats — often literally — into the background as the reactions and motivations of an increasingly befuddled André come to the fore. This allows De Geer to open up inquiries into modern masculinity, as André, complacent in his allyship credentials as the frontman of a feminist startup, eventually does an unforgivable thing to save face. The film also addresses the nature of millennial virtue-signalling, especially during one hilariously passive-aggressive exchange between André and another participant that boils down to oneupmanship over the relative importance of women’s rights versus climate change.
Meantime, Vera won’t stop miming imaginary chihuahuas and helping herself to wine glasses full of milk from the hotel bar, before finally showing up in a whole new persona. There are definite shades of Maren Ade’s peerless “Toni Erdmann” here: It, too, features a character whose reckless disregard for social norms causes deep stress to a straitlaced loved one. But unlike that touchpoint, De Geer’s film never suggests that Vera is doing any of this for André’s own good. Hers is a selfish voyage of discovery and for the most part André is churned up in its wake, along with his values and his sense of himself.
Right up to its finale — with perhaps the sweetest scene of deliberately exposed micturition in recent memory — “The Hypnosis” is acidly clever as it zeroes in on a key relationship quandary in our age of mandatory therapeutic self-revelation: To love someone is surely to want to help them become the truest version of themselves. But what if that version turns out to be a bit of an *******?
Norwegian cinema has been enjoying a moment lately, what with Joachim Trier’s crowdpleasing The Worst Person in the World pulling up to Drive My Car in the Oscar race and Kristoffer Borgli’s Sick of Me carving out a rep on the festival circuit. The Hypnosis, Ernst de Geer’s feature debut, sits somewhere between the two of them, fashioning a fitfully funny relationship drama that tilts at some very modern windmills (coaches, gurus, new-tech start-ups, workshops that involve blue-sky thinking) within a framework similar to Kristian Levring’s 2008 Danish drama Fear Me Not, in which a man’s personality changes after he becomes addicted to an experimental drug. The Hypnosis doesn’t quite follow that film’s melodramatic course, but there are similar thoughts raised about the human mind.
The two leads are André (Herbert Nordrum) and Vera (Asta Kamma August), a young middle-class couple who are launching a women’s wellness app called Epione, after the Greek goddess of health, based on Vera’s experiences growing up as a hemophiliac. The pair are excited to be invited to a pitch weekend called Shake Up, run by the patronizing but oddly charismatic Julian (David Fukamachi Regnfors), where they will get a chance to put forward their project to a panel of potential rich backers, and Vera thinks this would be a good time to address her smoking habit. This she does by visiting a hypnotherapist, who digs into her personality and her issues (“I feel like you’re holding back”), and floats the interesting concept that “maybe the smoking isn’t your problem”.
For a film called The Hypnosis, this scene is relatively brief, but the title casts a long shadow over the film just as surely as if it was called Chekhov’s Gun and sets up an anticipation — or rather an expectation — that works against what it is that the film does best. Which is to explore the dynamics of a couple who, having set up a viable and wholly ethical business together, suddenly find themselves at odds when it comes to the process of delivering it. André, used to his partner being more malleable, doesn’t take kindly when Vera begins to talk back to him, notably when she sabotages André’s attempt to impress Julian by claiming to have read a book he’d recommended. “It was so damn boring,” she chides him. “It really demanded that you really read it,” André counters, somewhat desperately, before Vera reminds him that he never actually finished it.
Julian is a key figure in the movie, since it’s really him, and not the eventual backer of the project, that becomes their focus — or perhaps it’s just André’s focus. After the hypnosis session, Vera seems to have become a whole new person, someone entirely unpredictable. At group sessions she playfully invents an imaginary dog, which André, and others, go along with, until it becomes something much darker (and, to be honest, a little bit too much even to be sustained by the film’s so-far workable comedy of unease). André responds in a way that could only be comedic in a Scandi or Nordic setting by drugging Vera just enough so that she’ll miss the keynote pitching event.
Sadly, although — and this is quite unusual and something to be treasured these days — The Hypnosis has all the elements for what it’s trying to do, it just doesn’t really come to a satisfying ending. As the story unfolds, the initial interest is with Vera and her new, unfiltered personality, but then André unexpectedly becomes the focus of the second half, trying to rescue what’s left of their dream (Nordrum’s understated performance won him the festival’s Best Actor award, which was by no means an obvious choice). It soon becomes clear that going to be tough to reconcile these two character’s trajectories convincingly, and, inevitably, the film doesn’t really manage it. But De Geer’s film at least goes into the gray areas of human behavior and like both the Triers (Joachim and Lars Von) makes poking holes in kind of obvious middle-class mores an unexpectedly enjoyable spectator sport.
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The Hypnosis | Ernst De Geer
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