McAvoy and Dawson are a patient and therapist caught up in an art-heist conspiracy.
(3 of 3)
And because she has that velvety, opioid voice. It's captured with pin-drop precision by sound recordist Simon Hayes, winner of this year's Academy Award for sound mixing for Les Misérables, which famously featured its actors (including fellow Oscar recipient Anne Hathaway) singing live on camera. For Trance, Hayes aimed for a heightened sense of reality so that the audience could experience Elizabeth's words as if they were inside Simon's mind and under her spell. "We wanted the voice way up front in the mix so the soundscape would be almost dreamlike," Hayes says.
Or nightmare-like. Trance is rough stuff, made by a man who moviegoers might have forgotten has no qualms about ripping his ostensible heroes to shreds. For Boyle, who's lately famous for the whimsical joy he brought to the London Olympics and whose most acclaimed movies have made the underdog top dog, it's a welcome diversion.
"Over the past few years," he says, "all the films are exactly the same in that they're all about someone overcoming insurmountable odds, whether it's the guy in Slumdog Millionaire or the guy in 127 Hours. The trick with Trance is that you don't know which character has the insurmountable odds. You're playing with the characters as they come in and out of focus. I love that."