Hypnotic — the 2021 Netflix thriller where a hypnotherapist turns self-help into something far more dangerous

Jenn (Kate Siegel) is stuck. A breakup, general drift, the usual catalogue of modern dissatisfaction. A friend’s recommendation leads her to Dr. Collin Meade (Jason O’Mara), a polished hypnotherapist whose consultation room is designed to project absolute trust. The first few sessions appear to help — and then things begin to go wrong in ways Jenn can’t explain or remember. Detective Rollins (Dulé Hill) starts circling with questions she has no answers to, and the gaps in her memory start to look less like side effects and more like something deliberate.

Hypnotic was directed by Matt Angel and Suzanne Coote, the duo behind The Open House (2018), and released on Netflix in October 2021 as an 89-minute genre package. The setting is largely confined to interiors — the therapist’s office, Jenn’s apartment, a few carefully lit corridors — which keeps the budget contained but also concentrates the film’s tension in its early exchanges.

What the film handles well, for most of its runtime, is the specific unease of the therapeutic relationship: the way a patient opens up, the power differential built into that arrangement, and how it can curdle if leaned on in the wrong direction. Siegel is the right choice for this material — her work in the Haunting of Hill House series (also Netflix) made her one of the more dependable screen presences in contemporary genre filmmaking, and here she carries scenes that the script leaves underwritten.

The direction is clean and composed, favoring controlled close-ups during the hypnosis sequences — it understands that the horror of being lost inside your own mind doesn’t need jump cuts. The score works in a similar register: ambient rather than emphatic. These are competent choices, even if they ultimately produce a film that is more watchable than memorable.

Where Hypnotic stumbles is in the final act, which retreats to a more conventional thriller resolution when the premise could have gone somewhere stranger. Anyone with a passing familiarity with the hypnosis-gone-wrong subgenre — from Trance to Get Out — will see the broad strokes coming before they arrive. As a single-sitting Netflix watch on a slow evening, it earns its runtime. As a film with anything new to add to its own genre, it is a less certain proposition.