You're always hoping for something good. Whether it's a movie or a song or a plate of spaghetti, you're always hoping it'll be satisfying or fulfilling. That doesn't always happen, of course, but even when things aren't good, they can still be enjoyable. And not just in a Mystery Science Theater 3000 "Let's make fun of how bad it is" way. Sometimes a failed attempt can be more entertaining than a seamless success.Trauma isn't good, but it also isn't bad. Trauma just…isn't.The movie starts out with Ben (Colin Firth) apparently losing his wife in an auto accident that throws him into a coma. He emerges from the coma to find the rest of the world mourning the death of a famous pop singer, leaving him to grieve while surrounded by indifferent grief. That's not an unpromising beginning for a story but it's followed by a whole lot of nothing. I'd almost defy anyone to watch the first half of this film and try to figure out what it's about. There are moments in the first half of Trauma when reality starts to seem unreal to Ben, but those moments don't relate to anything or signify anything or make any sort of point.Things do start to happen in the second half of the film, yet happen is all that they do. Telling a story is like building a chair. There is an almost unlimited number of ways to do it, but some of those ways work a lot better than others. I f a story starts at point A and A leads you to B and A and B flow into C and all three propel you into D and so on and so forth, that's one of the best ways to tell a story. That's the way most stories are told. Folks have been tinkering with that approach, trying to find different ways of getting from A to B to C to D. But whether they go from A to D or D to A or C to X to Q, most good stories start in one place and build a road that takes you to a different place.Trauma is uninterested in building that road. There's no sense that things are unfolding in Ben's life in any particular direction or for any particular purpose. When the film starts to upend Ben's view of reality, it doesn't mean anything to the audience because the revealed truth doesn't alter or have any connection to what Ben and the audience thought was the truth before. This movie is like a 90 minute long, bad twist ending. A good twist ending makes you look at what came before it in a different way. A bad twist ending tells you all the stuff you've been watching, didn't actually happen that way.For all that, though, if you really liked Colin Firth in some of his more high profile roles as the repressed Englishman that hopelessly romantic women eventually realize they should be with, you might enjoy watching give a completely different performance. Firth's Ben is a man descending into madness in a decidedly untheatric fashion. He's not terribly interesting on his own, but it's certainly not the standard "sanity slipping away" acting role. Mena Suvari is also quite lovely and manages to make a shallow character into a real person.This is a British film and like a lot of other British movies, it's an odd visual mix. Modern British cinema, at least in my somewhat limited experience, mixes very ordinary and pedestrian visuals with strikingly artistic images. Sometimes that can be quite compelling and sometimes that doesn't work at all, like when Trauma suddenly lapses into a scene that is a blatant rip-off of the movie Jacob's Ladder.All in all, I can't say that Trauma is a bad movie. It's just that it never amounts to anything…and I'm not sure the filmmakers even wanted it to be anything.

I knew not of this movie's existence until catching a viewing on the fantastic Independent Film Channel late one night. I was drawn into the story with wonderful acting by all that participated. The movie has a few twists & turns, but is easily followed. I felt empathy for the main character's apparent situation. Mena Suvari's performance was beautiful, & though I have watched her good performances in other films, this role could have been performed no better. She was perfect! I am now a Colin Firth fan as well. He too, was brilliant in his role. Unfortunately, this film is a little known treasure. Thank goodness for the Independent Film Channel for providing viewers an opportunity to see films that are not main stream commercial giants, but just as good, if not better. This movie did not rely on state of the art special effects. This film was driven by a good story, & great performances.

Trauma is psychotic thriller that grabs you in suspense and mystery until the end. It's about paranoia, obsession and loneliness, and its result is a complex mix of thoughts, images, illusions, sounds, nightmares and negation of reality!The plot is a bit complex to follow, because it has some twists, but it all begins with a guy in a Hospital awaken from a coma. All he knows, all he can remember, is that he had a car crash, his wife died in the accident and he was the one who was driving when the car crashed. So he feels angry with himself and guilty about his wife's death. But did really things happen as he thinks they did? At the same time the TV news are constantly relating the death of a star singer who was brutally murdered a few days ago. Is there any connection between these two deaths? Step by step we start discovering that this guy is just a bit paranoid and that something is not alright!Trauma is intense; it has mystery, suspense, action, complex plot, it has all ingredients to be a great thriller flick. It has also a good acting (not superb, but good enough, especially from the leading actor, Colin Firth, which plays the main character: Ben), and some good visual effects too. We can watch them especially in the nightmares/paranoia scenes.But I must say the end disappointed me a little bit, because by the rhythm the movie was going I was expecting a much more intense ending. Even so, it was a great thriller flick, one that makes you think, and one in which things are not as they seem they are at the first sight!

It sometimes gives masterpieces:of course "spellbound " comes to mind.But "Spellbound " was made at a time when screenplays were elaborate and there was no place for vagueness."Trauma" turns on the ambiguousness: nightmares,hallucinations, shrink consultation,medium,investigation,TV news,it's hard to find your way through this muddled plot.It borrows sometimes from "Jacob's ladder" ( the nightmare (?) in the hospital)but its conclusion,unlike Adrian Lyne's work, does not make much sense.A man (Colin Firth,28 in the movie,actually 44 when the movie was made)has lost his wife in a road accident and he was at the wheel.At the same time ,a female pop star is murdered.The widower suffers from amnesia and when he tries to find back his past, it will be nothing that he expected of course...As for Colin Firth,why don't you watch "another country" or "apartment zero" instead?