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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
KIDNAPPED Kidnapped is an “exception that proves the rule” sort of thing for me: not all torture porn has to be endured like a slog through a wasteland of misery with unlikable characters and bad direction. Director Miguel Ángel Vivas has made a thriller that can be categorized as such, since it’s an excuse to torture a bunch of characters (psychologically and sometimes physically). One demise, in particular, can be felt through the celluloid. But he’s also made it convincingly, with victims who are not just pawns in some serial killer’s game—we feel for them from the start of their ordeal and hope that they might get out of it, if not through ingenuity then by luck. The opening sets the tone for the horrors to come as a man staggers about one early morning, hands tied behind his back and a plastic bag over his head. As he can’t see where he’s going, he’s hit by a car. The driver comes out to give him a cell phone, and bloody and battered, the man calls his daughter and hears that “Mom’s dead.” Cut to the title card of the movie, and we’re off to what looks to be like a flashback to a well-off father, Jaime (Fernando Cayo), his wife Marta (Ana Wagener), and their 18-year-old daughter, Isa (Manuella Vellés), moving into their new gated community in Madrid. There’s some minutes of peace, but when criminals bust in through the windows and doors, it’s a shock since Vivas hasn’t created any kind of conventional build-up. It’s just dialogue, CRASH, and chaos. From practically the start, Vivas and his cinematographer reveal their game plan. They’re making something more sophisticated here: employing long takes and tracking shots, sometimes lasting as long as 10 minutes, maybe more, without many cuts. (There may actually be a total of just 15 or 20 shots in all during the whole running time.) It’s challenging, and it forces the audience to confront the brutality so that the “it’s only a movie” reassurance starts to slip away. (Albeit there’s a split-screen in a couple of instances.) Why are the kidnappers there? It’s simple enough, just to get as much money as possible and then run. Or maybe not. There’s one criminal among the bunch who seems sharper than the others (Guillermo Barrientos). He takes Jaime out on a ride during the night to various A.T.M.’s. These are the more slow-burning and fascinating set pieces—with the criminal not saying much and Jaime trying to find an opening to ask, “Why?” Meanwhile, the other two kidnappers are at home with the wife and daughter, and it’s here that the insanity erupts, though slowly and through the kinds of things that are hard to foresee, such as, say, other people coming to the door, like Isa’s sorta boyfriend. I don’t want to reveal how brutal it gets, but it does get to a point where I cringed every other minute during the final reel. It becomes really thrilling since the stakes are so high, and there isn’t the definite sense that “the good guys will win.” It’s pure cat-and-mouse stuff. The argument could be made that there is really no point really o the movie except to put this rich but innocent family through the ringer. But, again, those long takes and the realistic, real-time nature of how the plot unfolded engrossed me. There isn’t that hackneyed motivation out of a Saw movie of the killer punishing someone, or whatever. All in
all, Kidnapped is unpretentious edge-of-your-seat entertainment
for the late-night crowd (hence its release on the IFC Midnight label),
and perhaps the one if-you-must-see EXTREME movie of the summer.
Jack Gattanella
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