A police detective's search for his missing daughter pulls him into a web of mind manipulation and buried government secrets in Robert Rodriguez's 2023 thriller Hypnotic, led by Ben Affleck.
What is Hypnotic about?
Danny Rourke, a Texas detective still unraveling after his daughter's disappearance, catches a bank robbery case that doesn't add up — witnesses describe events that contradict the security footage entirely. A stranger seems able to bend other people's perception at will, and Rourke chases the man across Austin trying to understand how. The pursuit drags him into a shadowy program built around psychic influence, forcing him to question what actually happened on the day his daughter vanished. Detective work turns into a fight to separate real memory from manufactured memory. Alice Braga plays a fellow investigator pulled into the same chase, while William Fichtner appears as a figure whose calm exterior hides the film's central threat.
About the cast
Ben Affleck anchors the film as Rourke, playing the character's grief with more restraint than the genre usually allows. Alice Braga and William Fichtner round out a cast that also includes J. D. Pardo, Jeff Fahey, Dayo Okeniyi, Jackie Earle Haley, and Kelly Frye, each dropped into a plot built on shifting identity and unreliable perception.
Context & significance
Hypnotic marks a return to the twisty, reality-bending thrillers that first set Robert Rodriguez apart from straight action filmmaking, produced on a leaner scale than his studio work. The screenplay, co-written by Rodriguez, leans on practical misdirection and sharp editing rather than heavy visual effects to sell its central conceit. It reached UK and US theaters in 2023 as counter-programming to that summer's bigger releases, aimed at audiences who like a crime plot that keeps rewriting its own rules.
Watching Hypnotic on Ktime
Hypnotic streams on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, and this page — synopsis, cast details, and the FAQs below — is free to read without an account. Watching the film itself only requires a free K-Time login, and the interface is built around a Farsi-first experience for Persian-speaking viewers.