Past Life review – hypnotist opens psychic portal in pulpy British mystery

2026-03-16 - 15:12

Jeremy Piven is a celebrity hypnotist leading a client into dangerous waters in this Manchester-set affair also starring Pixie Lott and Aneurin Barnard If films had past lives, Simeon Halligan’s memory-regression thriller might have been a glossy 90s psychological drama, a Twilight Zone episode, or even a tricksy Hitchcockian voyage. But in the 2020s, it gets to be a serviceable, low-budget Brit-pulp outing featuring Jeremy Piven who, where other big-name buy-ins might have phoned it in, authoritatively anchors the affair as a celebrity hypnotist leading a client into dangerous waters. Traumatised Manchester journalist Jason (Aneurin Barnard, soon to be seen as the titular character in Duncan Jones’s Rogue Trooper) is to return to Syria, where six years earlier he witnessed jihadists slit a colleague’s throat. Probably a bad idea then, just before setting off, to volunteer on live TV to be hypnotised by Timothy Bevan (Piven), who claims to allow punters to access past incarnations. Jason is promptly transported into a scarlet, doorway-lined hall of horrors; one portal opens on to a scene of a horrific stabbing apparently committed by his previous self. So pregnant wife Claira (Pixie Lott) presses him to return to Bevan to get this door definitively locked and bolted. Continue reading...