Absolute waste of time. I had the feeling the "story" was being written as each scene was shot. Dull, dismal, boring, banal, with no redeeming features. Colin Firth was a waste. Mena Suvari played the usual wide=eyed gamin role. How does an abortion such as this film EVER get released? The producers must have realised early on that it was a DUD (to be extremely polite). Or are they in fact a bunch of retards who actually thought this movie had some merit? Hopeless, awful.

I am a big fan of the genre "Trauma" belongs to (the psychological / what-the-hell-is-really-happening? thriller), but I found this movie to be mostly a slog. It's slow-moving, dreary, and entirely humorless. There is A LOT of footage of Colin Firth moping around, and A LOT of information concerning a parallel plot line about the murder of a female singer / pop star; the twists of the plot near the end render most of the time devoted to those things above wasted! Speaking of twists, some of them (the wife....) are unbelievable, some of them (the psychiatrist....) are predictable. Colin Firth's strong performance is "Trauma"'s main - some would say only - asset. ** out of 4.

This is a movie that bears watching more than once. I found it interesting and absorbing, but needed a second (and probably will need a third) viewing of it to probe its depths.Ultimately it lets the viewer interpret events and decide what is happening, has happened, or may not be happening at all.There are clues throughout that I completely missed on first viewing. While I can appreciate what the director and writer involved were trying to convey -- a shattered mind and its perception in the person of an always excellent Colin Firth -- I can see where seeing it once and walking away confused and put off would be a common reaction.I truly liked seeing Firth go back to his early days of challenging acting roles and getting away from the romantic leads he often plays. He is key to appreciating this movie because everything is seen through the prism of his character --including all the other people with whom he may, or may not, be sharing his world. He is in every single scene.If the viewer is intrigued by seeing this puzzler of a film, then I recommend having a second go as much, much more is revealed, though not necessarily resolved. The solving of it is left, ultimately, to the viewer.I liked this puzzle of film very much.

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.