Film Review: The Great Hypnotist is too similar to The Sixth Sense
Things, and people, aren't always what they seem. That's the message that is drummed home right from the start in Leste Chen Cheng-tao's The Great Hypnotist, a psychological suspense-drama which starts with a sequence showing how a hypnotherapist masterfully uses "waking hypnosis" to get a middle-aged patient to deal with past trauma.
THE GREAT HYPNOTIST
Starring: Xu Zheng, Karen Mok Man-wai
Director: Leste Chen Cheng-tao
Category: IIA (Putonghua)
Things, and people, aren't always what they seem. That's the message that is drummed home right from the start in Leste Chen Cheng-tao's The Great Hypnotist, a psychological suspense-drama which starts with a sequence showing how a hypnotherapist masterfully uses "waking hypnosis" to get a middle-aged patient to deal with past trauma.
When questioned about his methods, Xu Ruining (Xu Zheng) proclaims that "My job is to cure my patients. I don't care by what methods". Brash and cocky, he appears to be at the top of his game — an impression given weight when his old mentor, Professor Fang (Lu Zhong), asks him to take on a patient that another of the senior academic's former students had found too difficult to handle.
After Ren Xiaoyan (Karen Mok Man-wai) turns up at Xu's office one evening, the two of them engage in a battle of will and wits; she challenges him to not so much cure her, as to explain why she's seeing ghosts. Adamant that she's "not sick", the woman, who had been described as "extremely logical", nonetheless does engage in a protracted conversation with the hypnotherapist that involves both of them making revelations about their personal backgrounds.
