The Great Hypnotist (Chinese 2014)

The Great Hypnotist

So I haven't had the opportunity to watch a group of Asian movies like I normally do for months. So I sat down this week and watched a few for the last few days.   I'm big on Korean cinema but I still dabble with Chinese and Japanese movies at times (Japanese anime and horror).  First on the list is the Chinesemovie The Great hypnotist.  Watching this movie, it gives you the intensity of most Korean suspense shows or movies.  Here is the movie synopsis.

A brooding psycho-mystery which pits a confident hypnotherapist against a beautiful patient who claims she can “see dead people,” “The Great Hypnotistreconfirms Taiwanese helmer Leste Chen as an accomplished stylist capable of dressing up B-movie material in a classy package. However, despite lush visuals, a melodic rhythm and a pair of screen-chewing lead perfs, the film is still hamstrung by Ren Peng’s screenplay, which not only blatantly steals from “The Sixth Sense” but extinguishes all suspense via an inane twist.

This stylish Taiwanese movie interested me because of the concept of battlingwits psychologically.  It starts off with the psychologist illustrating his hypnotist techniquewith a patient to an audience of college students.  During his presentation, he displays his hubris with a student that challenges his observation and his assessments during the presentation.  This set the stage for what kind of character he would be as the movie moved on.  When then meets his old professor that comes to see him and illicit help to treat a difficult patient that a friend of a friend Needs help with that others could not help.  He agrees and when the woman arrives to be treated.  You start to see there's something truly different about her as she engages with the therapist.  What stands out in this movie is when she pulls the therapist into her hypnotic state as he puts her into one and you begin to see two stories collide that was never introduced from the beginning.  The twist at the end is interesting but the foreshadowing was not done well enough to feel satisfied with the revelation of what was the real purpose of this session.  Overall a good movie that is worth the suspense and twist.  It has blatant story line theft form the movie "The Sixth Sense" but I feel it still stands alone as a good movie.