Kate Siegel plays Jenn, a woman in personal stasis after a breakup, the kind of drift that makes therapy sound like a reasonable fix. A friend's recommendation leads her to Dr. Collin Meade (Jason O'Mara), whose consultation room is designed to project authority, comfort, and total trust. The early sessions seem to work. Then the gaps begin — stretches of time Jenn can't account for, behaviours she doesn't recognise as her own. When Detective Rollins (Dulé Hill) starts circling with questions she has no answers to, what looked like therapeutic side effects starts to look like something deliberate.

Matt Angel and Suzanne Coote, the pair behind The Open House (2018), directed the film. Richard D'Ovidio wrote the screenplay, and the result arrived on Netflix in October 2021 as an 89-minute genre piece. Most of the action plays out in interiors: the therapist's consultation room, Jenn's apartment, a handful of carefully controlled corridors. That containment keeps the budget tight and the film's attention where it needs to be.

The premise taps into something genuinely uncomfortable about the therapeutic relationship — the openness it requires, the asymmetry of knowledge and vulnerability it creates, and how badly that arrangement can be abused. Kate Siegel is the film's strongest asset. Her work in The Haunting of Hill House established her as one of the more dependable screen presences in contemporary genre work, and here she holds together scenes the script leaves underwritten. Jason O'Mara is persuasively smooth without needing to oversell the menace.

The direction favours controlled close-ups during the hypnosis sequences, which is the right call — the horror of losing agency over your own mind doesn't need kinetic editing to register. The score stays in ambient territory, supporting without dramatising. Together these make for a film that is steady in its approach if not particularly inventive in its visual language.

Where Hypnotic becomes less certain is its final act. The film retreats to a fairly conventional thriller resolution when its setup had pointed toward something stranger. Anyone familiar with the hypnosis-gone-wrong subgenre — Trance, Get Out, or earlier entries in the patient-as-victim category — will recognise the broad shapes before they land. As an 89-minute watch when the evening demands something atmospheric and low-stakes, it holds together. As a film with something new to add to its own genre, it is a more provisional proposition.