TRANCE

Danny Boyle has certainly got style. He showed that in the opening ceremony for the Olympic Games and in Trance, which he somehow managed to knock off presumably before, during and after the Games, he shows it again in spades.

In structure this is a thriller with more layers than an onion, but in fact it’s a pyrotechnic display of the filmmaker’s craft, twisting and turning in every direction, a matter of flashbacks, dreams, hypnotism, murder, memories lost and regained and a conclusion impossible to predict.

If in the end it’s a triumph of style over substance it doesn’t really matter. Besides, in an ingeniously contorted screenplay by John Hodge and Joe Ahearne, it doesn’t lack substance – there are subplots aplenty – it’s just that when all is done and dusted, the substance hardly stands up to close scrutiny.

But again, never mind, for this is an absorbing entertainment wherein you never quite know who’s going to do what and with which and to whom.

It begins conventionally enough. James McAvoy, a debt-laden junior auctioneer in a big London auction house, arranges with cool, dangerous gang boss Vincent Cassel to steal Goya’s £27million Witches In The Air.

But here it gets complicated. For various reasons (don’t ask) McAvoy removes the painting and hides it before handing over the wrapped but empty frame. That’s the first of many double-crosses.

Oh, and during the transfer of the goods Cassel knocks him out and later tortures him to reveal where the painting is, only to discover that McAvoy has lost his memory. Hypnotism, he is told, might help.

So enter the hypnotherapist, Rosario Dawson, and she’s the one to keep an eye on from here on in. (Men, indeed, will find it very difficult not to keep an eye on her when at one point she glides, naked, into a room.)

And that’s as much as I’m going to tell you, except that for different reasons Dawson conspires not only with McAvoy but also Cassel to recover the painting and, to show that she’s an equal opportunities conspirator, beds them both.

And while all this is going on you, the audience, will be kept constantly on the wrong foot, wondering who are the good guys and who the bad (or are they all bad?) and trying to figure out what might conceivably happen next.

Very much in the film’s favour is that it’s comparatively short (101 minutes), that the action never flags and it’s beautifully photographed by Anthony Dod Mantle, who like Boyle won an Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire.

The casting, too, is cunningly done. Obviously, you think, McAvoy and Cassel – both of whom are excellent – will be the stars and Dawson just the obligatory eye candy. But no, it’s she who, though entering late, proceeds to pull the strings.

She’s an American with a previously prolific rather than outstanding CV but here Boyle gives her the chance, gratefully seized, to show that she can carry a film with the best of them.