‘Hypnotist’ blood-soaked thriller
Adopted king of American emotionalism homesick for Sweden
LOS ANGELES, Nov 30, (RTRS): Director Lasse Hallstr m is known primarily at this point for heart-tugging films aimed squarely at American audiences. His next big US release, “Safe Haven,” is, like his earlier “Dear John,” a Nicholas Sparks adaptation — not exactly the mark of someone interested in gritty foreign fare.
But Hallstrom has also made his first Swedish film in a quarter-century and, surprisingly, it’s an occasionally blood-soaked thriller. “The Hypnotist” is Sweden’s entry in the Oscars’ foreign film sweepstakes — and Hallstrom’s bid at not being typed, as he explained after TheWrap’s screening of the film Wednesday night at the Landmark Theatre.
“I wanted to show another side,” he told TheWrap’s editor-in-chief Sharon Waxman and a capacity crowd curious to see the filmmaker’s break from form. “I wanted to show people that I may not be as soft-hearted” as recent films would suggest, he added with a laugh.
Except he still is, when it comes down to it, all suggestions that he was doing a strict genre piece to the contrary. “I wouldn’t say it’s a thriller,” Hallstrom said. “It’s a family drama with thriller elements. I felt, at least with the Swedish thrillers that I’ve seen, that they tend to sacrifice performance for the plot a little bit. It may show in the final result that my key interest was in the family drama, and a little less in the plot.”
It didn’t hurt, when it came to deciding on the project, that one of the key players in that family drama would be his wife, Lena Olin. She plays the estranged wife of the titular hypnotist and distraught mother of a boy who’s kidnapped by a deranged killer.
Waxman asked why Hallstrom — as someone who’s been making films in America for almost 25 years and living in upstate New York for close to 15 — didn’t just transplant the action to the US, even if the source novel was Swedish.
“Maybe I could’ve,” he said, “but it was just a coincidence of not finding a script here that I really liked; being homesick for Stockholm, Sweden; finding a part for Lena; wanting to do a thriller; and getting back to working with people in Sweden that I really enjoyed working with (long ago). Watching Lena flourish speaking Swedish was great, and I think it was liberating for her to speak the language and improvise and play around with the material.”