FREE: Trauma

The listing, Trauma has ended.

comes in sleeve (no case)

TRAUMA has the courage to pose a storyline that is more involved with the interior aspects of a mind altered by physical events. We are asked to observe the world through the eyes of a battered brain which happens to belong to a man with a tattered past.

Ben (Colin Firth) is seen in the opening flashbacks driving a car at night with his wife Elisa. There is a car crash and Ben awakens from a coma in a hospital, convinced that Elisa is dead. He wanders the hospital, drawn to the morgue where the caretaker enhances the mystery of the place. Ben learns from the TV room that a famous singer Lauren Parris, for whom Elisa has been a dancer, has been murdered. His mind disintegrates and everything that follows is a melange of delusion mixed with bits of reality that exquisitely define how the post traumatic stress syndrome can be driven to psychosis if not recognized and treated.

Ben leaves the hospital (or does he?) and continues his art career in a vast building undergoing reconstruction (a building that has been a hospital....), befriended by his mate Roland and by his landlady 'Charlotte'. More flashbacks (mostly childhood memories) occur as Ben talks things out with a 'psychiatrist' and during episodes with channeler Petra (Brenda Fricker) he is informed that Elisa is not dead. Ben becomes a suspect in the murder of Lauren Parris and his chasing after evidence ultimately leads to a series of disasters, a series of metaphors and delusions, all of which find Ben sitting back in the hospital where he started.

Did any of this story really happen, or was it the fabrication of a mind traumatized to the brink of breaking? That is left for the viewer to decide. Though plagued with some static moments and a lot of conversation buried in background music and sounds, made all the more bizarre by some extraordinary camera work and tremendously inventive settings.