Beautiful Women

Went to see Captivity this past week. I was really looking forward to this film. Despite the fact that Elisha Cuthbert is a terrible actress (if you ask me, and you didn’t), she’s just so darned cute. Cute enough to want to watch sitting in a room, kidnapped, semi-tortured every now and then? Well, that depends on if you have a thing for Elisha Cuthbert, I guess. When I say her name in my head, it sounds so absurd.

Anyhow- it’s really a decent flick. I’d call it a horror movie, but it’s really a thriller/horror genre film. It seems like one of the new breed of torture ‘porn’ films like Hostel and similar movies…but, it’s really not. It’s actually not really all that gross, and there’s really not that much in terms of torture. One lady gets the short end of the ‘having a good day’ stick, but outside of that, it’s actually fairly tame. It’s more psychological in the same vein of the first Saw film.

Cuthbert plays a self absorbed actress/model (really not sure if she’s one or both) who clearly lives a very fake life. What is real in the celebrity age anyhow? Like many people in her situation, she’s not all that happy overall. She wants some time off to relax, but her hetic schedule won’t allow it…she goes to a bar (with her tiny dog in tow) to take part in some charity event, but before you know it, she’s drugged and kidnapped by some weirdo who has some mysterious, yet clearly devious, plans in store for her.

We see the kidnapper only in shadow. He wears a spooky looking black cape sort of outfit, his face always in shadow. Cuthbert pleads to be let go, but she knows deep down that that’s never going to happen. There are some gross, but not overly gross, parts of the film where Cuthbert is forced to drink a smoothie of sorts, but that’s all I’ll say about that. The guy plays video clips of her past interviews in the room he’s built for her, he stresses her with very loud sounds and bright lights, he makes he think she’s about to be killed, and more. It’s all very psychological, especially when we see the kidnapper’s hands putting together little magazine letter cutouts of various words such as ‘how to choose the victim’ and that sort of thing that explains her situation.

Cuthbert discovers she’s not the only captive in the building as well. There’s a man who has been kidnapped in the room next to her, and this leads to numerous twists and turns that are interesting, though somewhat predictable.

The film is beautifully shot…it is VERY well done technically. The director does a nice job in the genre as well- the right things stand out when they need to, and the camera is used to up the ante every now and then. Cuthbert’s acting isn’t too bad in this one. I halfway believed she was the lucky yet lonely celebrity who lives her life in a such a way that she truly can’t completely tell what is real and what isn’t. Real is what you can touch, one of the characters tells the other.

The movie was very short, and that shows in the storyline build up. It starts off rather quickly- there’s no 1 hour wait time to get to the action like some recent horror films (Wolfcreek, for example), but the big twists come too soon, it seems…and there’s not enough to hold it all together in the end. I liked the film, don’t get me wrong, but it was just too short (running time around 1 hour 15 minutes), and it felt like the writers just didn’t have enough material to fill out other areas that could have been covered more indepth and maybe a bit better.

Horror movie? Thriller? A mix of both? In the end, it’s a bit of both, and it’s a worthwhile viewing for fans of either genre.