moonspinner55 Colin Firth brings his graceful, thoughtful star-presence to this low-budget overachiever about a married man who wakes up in the hospital after lapsing into a coma following a horrific auto accident. He believes his beloved wife was killed in the crash, and later is questioned by a police inspector regarding the murder of a pop singer who disappeared on the same night as the accident. Jittery, outlandish piece decorated with superfluous visual incidentals (such as an ant farm with an apparent leak) and a nightmare sequence straight out of "Jacob's Ladder". Unpleasant, morose picture is watchable solely due to Firth's intense grip on this character. However, the ridiculous script, 'artistic' direction and editing defeats him and everyone else. *1/2 from ****

secondtake Trauma (2004)The creepy, mind-bending aura of this very British contemporary film, starring a lonely and confused man named Ben striving most of all to find reality itself, has so many really interesting aspects you can't help but wonder why it doesn't quite sweep you away. Or worse, why it's downright bad by the end, all the building up and forced drama being affectations built on sand.And leading man Colin Firth is one of our masters of brooding, interior acting, which he does extremely well once again, against the odds set up by director Marc Evans. Firth's portrayal of Ben actually makes the most of all the ambiguity of the clichéd plot, and we try to follow his mind as it keeps slipping from one point of view to another. It sounds great, on paper. But this is no Coen Brothers film, nor a David Lynch or David Fincher film, even if there are shades of each of these styles and intentions throughout. The sets are gloomy if sometimes too obvious--Ben decides to live in a nearly abandoned former mental hospital, for example. And the background crime which pins together the various facts, the death of a beloved and lovely celebrity, leads to the usual hardboiled detective (Brit style) and to newspaper clippings and flashbacks and glimpses on crude surveillance monitors.If you are curious about the approach, check it out. I think the first twenty minutes gives a great idea of the whole movie. It just isn't smartly made or cleverly written, and this kind of card game with possible realities, which the viewer is made to play as much as Ben, requires smartness and cleverness, for sure.Ben may actually be insane, may actually have murdered the person we are led to believe he did, and may actually belong in the institution he is shown, or not shown, inhabiting. Yes, it's willfully confusing. He wrestles with where he lives, where he walks. He wonders about the darks stairs leading to the gloomy underground rooms. The camera whirls or blurs, many times, almost as if they run out of motivation and need to switch to a camera effect right when maybe, through some actual writing and thinking, we could piece together some of the implied complexity (the way they do in, say, "Memento"). In the end, we are given the police investigator giving it all a knowing eye.Besides the faltering writing, there are secondary actors who are not at their best (and whose best isn't always inspired, at that). For one, Mena Suvari, who I know from "American Beauty" in a kind of odd role where her blankness works well, is just far to lifeless and wooden to make her mysterious presence across the hall either scary or provocative. And so, heads up on this one. It's not what it seems, or could have been.

gavin6942 Awaking from a coma to discover his wife has been killed in a car accident, Ben's world may as well have come to an end...The focus of this film is Ben (Colin Firth), whose world is a bit of a shambles. He does not always know what he knows, or may see things he does not really see. Unfortunately for me, I do not feel the film made this clear enough to really get a handle on.The most disappointing thing about this film is the lack of Mena Suvari. She is on the cover, and is the reason I picked up the title. But, you know, she is in it less than a quarter of the time. That let me down. She needed more speaking parts, and not just because Firth's accent is too thick at times.

BroadswordCallinDannyBoy Ben wakes up from a week long coma resulting from a car wreck. He is then told that the crash took his wife and he falls he falls into a slump and becomes somewhat of a loner. Things get weird when Ben starts to have hallucinations and is suspected of a murder of a pop star - what's real? What's not?The film has an interesting premise in which a man's troubled mind starts to torment him and there are some decent scenes of hallucination and terror, but overall the film is very muddled. First of it is very very slow, almost to the point where it becomes uncomfortable. Second, there is no atmosphere that pervades the film, instead just individual creepy scenes that overall add up to much less than desired.The flip side to that is that the film doesn't overplay anything and the revelations of the truth seem to feel more human rather than shocking or mind-blowing. That might result in some viewers disappointment, but it is interesting to see a more down-to-earth psychological ending. Just too bad that it's muddled throughout. 5/10Rated R, inexplicably, for some startling scenes and restrained profanity