Director: Marc Evans, UK, 88min
Stars: Colin Firth, Mena Suvari
On general release
A tense psychological thriller that deals with love, grief and madness, Trauma is also an adroit examination of the loneliness and isolation that only a massive conurbation like London can provide. In a tale etched against the backdrop of a media-obsessed culture, Firth is the luckless Ben, who wakes from a coma to discover that his wife has died in a car that he himself crashed. Ben attempts to rebuild his life but, plagued by visions of his dead spouse, he slips into insanity. As his hallucinations get more bizarre, he becomes the prime suspect for the murder of a pop star whose career he has followed a little too closely. Well executed by Evans and co-starring Suvari, Naomie Harris, Tommy Flanagan and Sean Harris, Trauma has all the dark foreboding of some of Hitchcock’s more intense offerings, and ably illustrates the jarring reality that it is the Devil within who should scare the pants off us, not the one without.
Chris Sullivan