Ben Affleck’s Hypnotic looks like the trippiest sci-fi film since Tenet

If the trailer for Robert Rodriguez’s upcoming psychological thriller Hypnotic, which was released on Monday ahead of the film’s theatrical premiere next, could be described in a single sentence, it would be: What if Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure and Christopher Nolan’s InceptionA baby was born? What if William Fichtner was (Get angry, The Dark KnightDid he have evil psychic powers?

Ben Affleck plays Daniel Rourke as a detective who is trying to find his daughter abducted. When Rourke is called in to investigate a series of mysterious bank robberies in which the culprits all seem to have been put under hypnotic suggestion, he inadvertently unearths a clandestine government program connected to a sinister homicidal criminal (William Fichtner) with the ability to warp people’s perceptions of time and space. With the aid of a gifted psychic (Alice Braga), Rourke races to catch the true culprit before he causes anyone any more harm, but can he even be certain whose side he’s on any more? Is he actually married? Does this movie even exist?

The trailer is certainly exciting, trippy and explosive. William Fichtner is a mix of both. Cure’s Kunio Mamiya and Jessica Jones’ Kilgrave is worth the price of admission alone, but combine that with hard-boiled Ben Affleck performance and Robert Rodriguez-style action sequences, and Hypnotic might just have the makings of one of this year’s biggest surprises. It could be a hoax. We’ll just have to see for ourselves when Hypnotic premieres in theaters on May 12.