Trauma (15)

**

THERE are few things more frustrating than horror movies that are ashamed of what they are.

Trauma is being marketed as a horror movie, is directed by Marc Evans, who made the excellent serial killer-meets-Big Brother flick My Little Eye and is produced by a subsidiary of British company Little Bird, the Ministry Of Fear that has been set-up to produce horror movies. But it’s not a horror movie. Oh no.

What is it then? Answers on a postcard to the usual address.

Ben (Colin Firth) awakes from a coma to find that his wife Elisa has died in a car crash that may or may not have been his fault. Ben is grief-stricken, confused and after a few weeks in hospital attempts to rebuild his life by moving out of the marital home and into an apartment in a spooky converted hospital. Bad idea.

As is the casting of American Beauty’s Mena Suvari as the young woman Firth gets to reluctantly flirt with in his usual clipped, emotionally repressed manner.

Firth wanders in and out of scenes looking perpetually confused, but it becomes apparent that Ben’s selective memory gaps are hiding a darker truth. Why do the police in the sinister form of Kenneth Cranham suspect him of complicity in his wife’s death?

Even more puzzlingly, why do they also seem to suspect him of the murder of the rather anonymous sounding pop star Lauren Paris?

And while we’re about it, since when did the death of an R&B singer unite the nation in a display of bereavement not seen since Princess Diana died? If Samantha Mumba kicked the bucket would the entire country grind to a standstill?

Evans handles the dislocating effects of grief very well in the early stages but it soon becomes obvious that the fractured narrative is hiding a "Big Twist" which you’ll guess an hour before it’s revealed.

Trauma has all the hallmarks of a good, solid idea for a half-hour short that has been padded far beyond its natural length.

Brenda Fricker and Scots actor Tommy Flanagan turn up in pointless roles that do nothing other than extend the running time.

Once you’ve guessed the secret lurking behind Richard Smith’s undercooked script, Evans’ approach becomes tiresome. It is like watching a bad magician continually misdirecting his audience so they won’t see the trick coming.

Firth is so clenched he’s positively constipated. Ben must have looked like a welcome change of pace for the actor but it looks increasingly like he simply cannot play anyone other than Colin Firth. At least he’s consistent.

Evans demonstrates he’s capable of better things by playing with nightmarish imagery. There’s an effective, jerky, blurred, spook scare lifted from Jacob’s Ladder and the escaped ants in Firth’s apartment recall the encroaching signs of mental disturbance in Polanski’s Repulsion.

Those films were horror movies though, Trauma thinks rather better of itself. It is a psychological thriller. However the psychology is banal and the thrills are few and far between.