Hypnotic might have one of the worst post-credits twists ever

There’s a new Ben Affleck movie coming out this week and chances are you probably don’t know anything about it. No, not the Nike drama Sky, which recently made its debut on Prime Video. And no, he’s not starring in his wife Jennifer Lopez’s new movie The mother on Netflix.

I’m talking about Hypnoticthe new psychological thriller from director Robert Rodriguez (Spy kids, Machete), where Affleck plays a detective named Rourke who is searching for his lost daughter while also hunting down a master criminal who can hypnotize people into doing his bidding.

If you didn’t know, you’re not alone. The film premiered in just over 2,000 theaters, with career worst box office openings for both Affleck and Rodriguez. But we’re here to talk about the post-credits sequence, which is something I’m still thinking about a few days later.

[Ed. note: Significant spoilers for Hypnotic follow.]

In Hypnotic“Hypnotics” can control other people’s actions by manipulating their sense of the world, through eye contact or a series of simple voice commands. Initially, this is shown by William Fichtner’s character, who robs a bank in one of the first sequences of the film.

A little over halfway through the film, it is revealed that Ben Affleck’s character is actually a powerful hypnotist who arranged his daughter’s kidnapping and erased his own memory, all for her protection. The daughter of two powerful hypnotics, she is wanted as a weapon by the government department in charge of hypnotics (inspiringly dubbed “The Division”), and Rourke will go to any lengths to avoid being used in that way. Unless he does, at least.

In the film’s final act, after regaining his memory, Rourke tracks down his daughter Minnie (Hala Finley) at a ranch where he had hidden her. He then sets up a trap for Fichtner’s character (now known as “The Director”) and the rest of The Division, leading to a carnage where we see the teenaged Minnie hypnotize dozens of people into brutally killing each other, including overpowering The Director himself, before the reunited family embraces it. It’s a bizarre ending for a film built around the idea of ​​not turning young Minnie into a weapon, and then it gets even more bizarre.

Image: Hypnotic Film Holdings

However, in the middle of the credits, it is revealed that Affleck’s foster father Carl (Jeff Fahey), who appeared to shoot The Division agents to protect his granddaughter, was Fichtner. Hypnotics have the power to disguise themselves in other people’s minds, and it appears that the principal disguised himself as Carl in case things went wrong. The final part of this reveal has the director looking at the corpse which appears to be his, breaking the hypnotic connection and revealing that it was Carl who died in the fighting.

This is bizarre for a number of reasons. First of all, it means that if you look Hypnotic and leave when the credits begin, you leave believing that good has prevailed. When you leave after the credits, you do so with the knowledge that evil has won. Which is a pretty drastically different ending. But more importantly, it means the entire back third of the movie just didn’t happen (or at least as the audience saw it), and you won’t find out until you stay for the credits.

The whole basis for The Division trying to capture Minnie in the first place is the idea that she is the most powerful hypnotist there is, thanks to basic genetics. She’s even powerful enough, we’re told, to bend The Director to her will. But with the post-credits reveal, it turns out that none of that is actually true. The director was more powerful than Minnie all along, and we wonder why this mattered in the first place. It’s a mind-boggling choice for one of the most bizarre movies of the year.