3 out of 5

Directed by: Atom Egoyan

The Captive, on one level, is an almost insultingly mundane movie: a missing child, the guilty father, the haunted mother, the descent into a world of sexual deviancy…  Especially over the last few years, we’ve seen slews of this formula in movies and shows, attacking it from different points of views and genres.  So to have this now generic concept chopped up as per Egoyan, with moments from before and after the disappearance scattered about without, perhaps, much rhyme or reason, it seems like a nonsense attempt to complicate something with which we’re already familiar.  Which isn’t untrue if that was the intent.  But it’s Egoyan, and so viewed through the lens of his previous works, we might suspect he has his motivations – his themes of guilt, of manipulation, of voyeurism – for structuring his film as such, and ‘Captive’ then can start to take on impressive depth with some of the details carefully scattered throughout.  For better or worse, though, Atom did decide to leash this project to a plot with a beginning and end, and so, as has happened in a few of his films, the emotional context feels sacrificed on occasion to hustle us through some of that silly plotting stuff.  At points this does make the film feel rather simplistic or even stupid, with characters – the father, the police – responding somewhat illogically because they’re there to support an idea and not necessarily be real, so to be fair, if you want a procedural, ‘The Captive’ will fail for you.  But if you’re open to Atom’s wandering style, weaving elements about to try to achieve contemplation on something, this is still a good effort by the director, though a bit compositionally bland, whether or not that was in service of the point.