USA Today has published a sneak peek at director Danny Boyle’s new thriller, Trance, starring James McAvoy (upcoming X-Men: Days of Future Past), Vincent Cassel (Black Swan) and Rosario Dawson (upcoming Sin City: A Dame to Kill For).
The 2013 film is about an art heist gone wrong and is rated R for sexual content, graphic nudity, violence, some grisly images, and language.
Boyle gave the newspaper more details: “It begins like that. But it takes the idea of a stolen painting and develops into something sleeker and more psychological, with twists and turns… I wanted to do an updated noir, give it a contemporary spin in terms of emotion. Noir is usually cold. I wanted it to be more emotionally charged. It’s the first time I put a woman at the heart of a movie.”
He added that, much like his 1994 film Shallow Grave, the characters will operate inside their own bubble. “Their only point of reference is to each other. There are no outsiders.”
Here’s the official plot summary:
“Trance,” directed by Oscar®-winning filmmaker Danny Boyle (“Slumdog Millionaire,” “127 Hours”) and co-written by Oscar®-nominated long term collaborator John Hodge (“Shallow Grave,” “Trainspotting”) is a seductive and enigmatic thriller starring James McAvoy, Vincent Cassel and Rosario Dawson.
Fine art auctioneer Simon (McAvoy), in league with a gang led by underworld boss Franck (Cassel), plots the audacious theft of a masterpiece by Goya from a major public auction. When Simon double-crosses the gang during the robbery, Franck retaliates violently and knocks him unconscious.
In the aftermath of the heist, Simon sticks stubbornly – and perhaps shrewdly – to his claim that the violent trauma has left him with no memory of where he stashed the artwork.
Unable to coerce the painting’s location from Simon, Franck and his associates reluctantly join forces with a charismatic hypnotherapist (Dawson) in a bid to get him to talk. But as they journey deeper into Simon’s jumbled psyche the boundaries between reality and hypnotic suggestion begin to blur and the stakes rise faster and far more dangerously than any of the players could have anticipated.
