THE CAPTIVE (MA)
★★
Dendy
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Canadian director Atom Egoyan isn't having much of a run. After his fumbling of last year's Devil's Knot – a dramatisation of the true story of three West Memphis teenagers wrongfully convicted of murder – this follow-up film was booed at its premiere in Cannes earlier in the year and has little going for it despite the strong cast and elegant cinematography.
Neither a psychological thriller not a police procedural, the film is overwhelmed by a gloomy mood of quiet disinterest as parents Matthew (Ryan Reynolds) and Tina Lane (Mireille Enos) deal with the abduction of their daughter Cassandra.
While there's a powerful scene that covers the moment young Cassandra disappears, we already know who did it and what happens to her, thanks to Egoyan's misguided tactics of flipping back and forward in time from the 10-year old Cass – a talented young ice skater – to eight years later when she is working for her effete captor Mika (Kevin Durand).
Like nearly all the characters in this film, the older Cass has developed a morose and listless sense of powerlessness and spends her time on the Internet soliciting other young girls into Mika's paedophile ring.
The screenplay (written by Egoyan and David Fraser) never explores Mika's motivation, and steers clear of the presumably messy details of what Mika's "ring" actually does. An elegant, opera-listening businessman with a huge house in Niagara, Mika runs a sideline in psychological torture, leaving reminders of Cassandra in the hotel where her mother Tina works, secretly filming her angst at the discovery of each memento.
It's all rather implausible – but nothing compared to the disastrous subplot written for the town's police investigator (Rosario Dawson) who also goes missing while looking into the affairs of Mika and his well-heeled boss Vince (Bruce Greenwood).
The promising angle of Cassandra's link to her past through her ice-skating is teasingly forgotten in the film's lacklustre conclusion. With Egoyan co-writing, directing, producing, and co-editing, it's clear who is at fault – the clumsy time shifts, lack of drama and unbelievable story making the cast's attempts at credibility all but impossible.
Enos in particular is left to wail and gnash her teeth in a performance I'm sure she will want to quickly forget. Reynolds – who is difficult to tell apart in the two time zones – just seems disinterested.
Yet Egoyan's worst sin lies with the thin characterisation of Cassandra – her years of incarceration and abuse never properly examined, and then wiped clean by the film's simplistic final frames.