Netflix: Hypnotic entertains, but doesn’t mesmerize

Kate Siegel makes her second October 2021 appearance on Netflix with their original film Hypnotic, which begins streaming on October 27. Hypnotic is more thriller than horror, but there are horror components to the film.

SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains some spoilers for the film.

Siegel (who also appeared in Netflix’s Hush) plays Jenn, a woman experiencing trauma from a fairly recent miscarriage she suffered. That’s bad enough, but she was about six months into the pregnancy, meaning this was more a case of the child being extremely premature or stillborn. As a result of the loss, she and her fiancee’ Brian (Jaime M. Callica, Ruthless) broke up, and while he seems to want to reconcile, Jenn cannot focus on a relationship.

Knowing of her anxiety, her friend Gina (Lucie Guest, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina) recommends a psychotherapist she is seeing and introduces Dr. Collin Meade (Jason O’Mara, The Man in the High Castle) to Jenn at a party. Jenn makes an appointment and begins seeing Dr. Meade, with pretty good results.

As it turns out, Meade is also a hypnotherapist, and he talks Jenn into allowing him to hypnotize her to help her overcome her residual anxiety. That’s where things start to go wrong. Sneaky Dr. Meade talks her into meeting with her ex, and during dinner, Jenn has a blackout episode. Jenn immediately suspects Meade and digs into his past, aided by Detective Wade Rollins (Dule Hill, Psych).

While up to this point, Hypnotic was doing a good job keeping my interest, here is where the film started to get a little sketchy for me.

It felt like a section of the story had been cut because we jump from Dr. Meade helping Jenn to him suddenly becoming dangerous. It just felt like there was no gradual buildup to him turning into a bad guy. Also, Meade has some sinister stuff in his history, and it feels like his past would probably result in him losing his license, but apparently, that’s not the case.

The cast is uniformly good, even if a few of them don’t get a lot of screen time. Siegel is, of course, good in everything she does. The role of Jenn doesn’t allow her to give quite the range of emotions she did in the recent Midnight Mass, but she is still sympathetic (and nobody can scream as she does).

Dule Hill has such a great face, and his portrayal of the detective is solid; I found myself rooting for him as he tried desperately to prove that Dr. Meade was up to no good. In a minor role, Tanja Dixon-Warren portrays Dr. Stella Graham, another hypnotherapist who tries to help Jenn, and I like her a lot.

Overall, Hypnotic kept my interest, and I was along for the ride; I wish the storyline had been a bit tighter.

Did Hypnotic thrill you, or did it leave you cold? Give us your own reviews in the comments section.