Hypnotic (2023)
- Chris Barembruch
- Apr 12
- 4 min read
Movie Review
By C.J. Barembruch | I Am Is and Was ™
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Namaste. 👋
Let me tell you something that happened to me yesterday.
I sat down to watch a movie — a thriller, a Ben Affleck action film — and somewhere in the first twenty minutes I realized I wasn't just watching a story unfold on a screen.
I was watching the First Hermetic Law in motion.
The All is Mind. The Universe is Mental.
I didn't expect that. But that's the thing about truth — it doesn't wait for an invitation. It just shows up. Sometimes in a therapy session. Sometimes in a homeless shelter. And sometimes in a 94-minute thriller directed by Robert Rodriguez that the critics dismissed and the audiences underestimated.
I am not the critics.
What Is Hypnotic?
Hypnotic (2023) stars Ben Affleck as Danny Rourke — an Austin detective carrying the kind of wound that doesn't heal. His daughter was taken. Three years of therapy. Three years of living inside the worst moment of his life like it was the only moment that existed.
Sound familiar?
He gets pulled out of a session by his partner. There's a tip about a bank robbery. And from the moment he walks through those doors — reality starts to bend.
What follows is a mind-bending thriller that asks one of the most important questions a human being can ask:
What if the reality you are living inside — the one that feels completely real, completely solid, completely true — was constructed for you by someone else?
What if the cage wasn't made of iron?
What if it was made of thought?
Why This Film Hit Different
The critics gave this a 32% on Rotten Tomatoes. They called it clunky. They called it derivative. They said it borrowed too heavily from better films.
I say they missed the point entirely.
This is not a perfect film. But it is a deeply intelligent one — and it is asking questions that most people are not awake enough to recognize as questions at all.
The First Hermetic Law tells us that the mind is not just the place where thoughts happen to us. It is the place where reality is created by us. And when that creative power is hijacked — when someone else plants the thoughts, constructs the memories, builds the world you believe you are living in — you don't even know you are a prisoner.
Because the prison has no walls you can see.
That is what Hypnotic is really about.
It is not just a story about a father trying to get his daughter back. It is a story about a man clawing his way through a constructed reality — layer by layer — back to what is true. Back to what is real. Back to the thing that was stolen from him before he even knew it was gone.
If you have ever spent years living inside a story that someone else wrote for you — a story about who you are, what you deserve, what is possible for you — then this film will hit you somewhere deeper than the plot.
I promise you that.
The Cast
Ben Affleck carries this film with a quiet weight that suits the character perfectly. He is not asked to be flashy. He is asked to be a man who is lost and fighting anyway — and he delivers that with more conviction than the critics gave him credit for.
William Fichtner as the villain Dellrayne is precise and genuinely unsettling. Alice Braga holds her own in a role that is far more layered than it first appears. And young Hala Finley, as Minnie, does something in the final act that I did not see coming — and I have watched a lot of movies.
Robert Rodriguez — directing, shooting, and editing — keeps this lean and purposeful. At 94 minutes it doesn't overstay its welcome. And his son Rebel Rodriguez's score is exactly what the film needed.
The Hermetic Thread
Beyond the First Law — the idea that mind precedes and creates reality — you will also find the Law of Cause and Effect running underneath every scene. Every action in this film was set in motion by a choice made before the film even begins. Nothing happens by accident. Every thread connects.
You will find the Law of Correspondence — as above so below, as within so without — in the way the constructed inner world mirrors the outer one with terrifying precision.
And you will find something that I personally know something about — the moment a man realizes that the story he has been living inside was never the real one. And what happens when he chooses to wake up anyway.
That is not a spoiler. That is a door.
Whether you walk through it — that is up to you.
The Verdict
Is Hypnotic a perfect film? No.
Is it a film that will make you think — genuinely think — about the nature of reality, the power of the mind, and what a parent will walk through fire to protect?
Absolutely yes.
I loved this movie. Not because it was flawless. Because it was asking the right questions. And in my world — a question worth asking is worth more than an answer that plays it safe.
Isandwas Rating: 4 out of 5
The critics slept on this one.
Don't make the same mistake.
Namaste. 👋
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