Trauma

This psychological thriller is not easy to follow both because the narrative is rather convoluted and director Marc Evans has recourse to all manner of unusual camera angles and effects to suggest the central character's disoriented mental condition. Colin Firth plays a man who awakes from a coma to find that his wife is dead after a car accident in which he was the driver. At the same time a female pop singer is found murdered. That she looks like his wife, that he had been stalking her and that the police consider him a suspect adds to his stress.

This all sounds very contrived and it is, often looking like a BBC teledrama, which it effectively is, but Evans keeps the storyline in such a state of unrest that one has to pay too much attention to hanging on to the twists and turns of the plot to worry about anything else. It's quite creepy in a Hitchcock-with-digital effects way, not least of which for the presence of abundant ants and the doll-like Mena Suvari who is perfect slasher-movie material. It is, however, the spider that you've got to watch out for.

 

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