Eight years ago, an Ontario couple (Ryan Reynolds and Mireille Enos) lost their young daughter Cassandra when she was kidnapped from the back seat of their vehicle, while stopping at a diner. Held captive for nearly nine years by a well- organized pedophile Mika, (Kevin Durand) Cassandra becomes a recruitment poster child, helping lure other young girls from the Internet.
During this time, Mika also plays a demented game of cat and mouse with Cassandra’s mother, leaving behind personal items for her to find at work, watching her on a secret surveillance system. The police are unable to find Cassandra, even after a more recent photo of her surfaces online, but Niagara Falls is a small town and ultimately her own father finds her.
We say, “Stockholm Syndrome doesn’t explain why it’s always winter in Canada.”
TAYLOR: After being laughed out of the Cannes Film Festival and being too embarrassed to release The Captive at the Toronto Film Festival (I presume,) Canada’s Atom Egoyan sent his terrible movie to Vernon, lucky us. This film makes no sense.
HOWE: I’ve had more exciting trips to the dentist office. How do I start to say how bad this film is? It’s so slow, paint dries quicker. The storyline is all over the place, jumping from one time frame to another. I’m not saying the non-linear technique is wrong in a movie like this, it’s just that it didn’t feel quite right. To me it was messy and sometimes a little confusing what time line we were in, as the eight-year difference wasn’t clearly defined. For example, no one seemed to age (except Cass,) dress any different or drive different vehicles, even though there is nearly a decade’s difference.
TAYLOR: It was also always winter. Perhaps this was to cement the bleakness of the story. The Captive wants to be a Hitchcock thriller. It wants to plod along at a snail’s pace, out of order to confuse you, with tension building as the audience comes to realize the suffering of both the parents of the victim and the victim herself, while we get closer to solving the case. It wants us to hate the (extremely well-organized and powerful) pervert at the helm and celebrate when justice is served. The problem is, there is no tension, suffering, solving or justice. This film seems incomplete, like it wants us to celebrate catatonia while we fill in the blanks. It is almost like The Captive cut out all the “good parts” (which would actually be awful to see) leaving us to watch police procedures go nowhere, while hurt parents brood and a weirdo takes it over the top. So I must ask, why make the movie in the first place? The Captive is terrible on multiple levels.
HOWE: But on a plus note we can’t see anything worse this year.
— Taylor gives The Captive 1 tiny moustache out of 5.
— Howe gives it 1 conifer tree out of 5.
The Captive is currently playing at Galaxy Cinemas in Vernon.
– Brian Taylor and Peter Howe are film reviewers based in Vernon, B.C. Their column, Reel Reviews, appears in The Morning Star every Friday and Sunday.
