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Home invasions are tetchy subjects for anyone with a home and a family, but especially if you’re like me and live a scant few miles down the road from the scene of a hideous example of the criminal phenomenon. I won’t provide details out of respect for the family, but it involved not only robbery but rape and the house being set on fire, burning most of the family alive inside. So I was necessarily distressed at the idea of watching Miguel Angel Vivas’s Kidnapped (Secuestrados). From the cover image alone it promises brutality, and while it is a marvelously well-made film, it does deliver on that promise. Stomach-churningly.
| The basic premise of Kidnapped won’t take long to lay our for you: there’s a nice Madrid family moving into a new home, well off enough to have a team of movers doing the job for them. Jamie and Marta are a couple heading towards the twilight of their lives, equally entranced and exasperated with their headstrong 18-year-old daughter, Isa. There’s a little stress in the house over Isa wanting to dash out to a party with her boyfriend, Cesar, while Marta wants to have a family-only dinner on their first night in the new house. She’s upset at Jamie for telling Isa she can go, and he has almost charmed her into docility when all hell breaks loose. |
That's a bad day.
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From that point on, it is a pretty typical scenario. Marta and Isa are kept at the house, under the menacing eye of two hooded intruders, while the leader of the gang takes Jamie out on an ATM spree, withdrawing the maximum amount from each of the family’s cards, with the simple threat that any shenanigans will result in a phone call that will result in grievous bodily harm happening to Jamie’s women at home. And as comes to pass with many thieves, the scenario only gets worse. Jamie has to sit in the car and stew until one minute after midnight, and go through the withdrawal procedures anew.
Meanwhile back at the house, things aren’t faring much better. There are the expected knocks at the door, and the expected “who is that? get rid of them” conversations, that expectedly don’t go well. While Jamie is sweating it out, scared for his family, his family is getting the much more harrowing end of the stick, as the house descends into more and more chaos and violence. One of the invasion gang is a coked-up lunatic, while the other is a more genial, nobody needs to get hurt type. This is also part of the paint-by-numbers cinematic home-invasion plot.
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Clunk!
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At this point in may sound like I’m bad-mouthing the film, but nothing could be farther from the truth. There is nothing new under the sun, and it is especially difficult to drum up an innovative home invasion plot. So instead Vivas decided to employ these tropes, but shroud around them a damned finely-shot film. Right off the bat, we get an amazing intro to the family: not only is it a scene strictly devoted to setting up the characters, and their relationships to each other, but the first seven minutes of it are one long tracking shot. I had to go through it a second time and search for a cut, but there isn’t one. |
He also does his best to achieve a verisimilitude. Aside from the long one-shot, which really makes you feel like you’re walking around inside the house with the family, the colors are warm, and the actors don’t have a tremendous amount of makeup. There is also little along the way of score, instead having most scenes accompanied by whatever incidental noise is happening in the background. Such as Jamie and his captor, sitting in Jamie’s SUV, with the rain drumming a beat on the roof and the syncopation of the intermittent wipers. Add this up with the marvelously-executed physical effects, and once the violence comes into play it is stomach-churning.
There are downsides, though. The movie clocks in at a tight 85-minutes, and once the action starts it keeps you on the edge of your seat, but I couldn’t help the niggling thought in the back of my brain that there was no character arc; there was no progression in the story other than a downward spiral into the depths of cruelty that sociopathic avarice can bring to bear from one human being onto another. But I already knew that. I didn’t necessarily want a traditional US movie triumph over evil, as that is far from realistic, might I needed a little something more. With just home invasion, robbery, violence, and death, an otherwise finely-crafted film falls into the exploitation category, and I can’t hang with that.
Even the teaser shot that opens the film exists with one foot in each of those dimensions. The very opening is a close-up shot of…something. We can vaguely see it is someone’s head in a bag, but even the orientation of the body is not clear. The camera lingers on it, almost lovingly, and just as we start to divine that this is a body lying on the ground and the camera is down at its level, the man, as it turns out, wakes up, the camera rises with him, and he’s off and running, suffocating in the bag with his hands tied behind him. He runs into the road, gets hit by a car, and the driver tears off the bag and gives him a phone…just so he can get bad, bad news from home.
| On the surface, there is no problem with this scene. It is well-shot and tense. However, it has nothing to do with the rest of the film, except maybe to suggest the same gang has struck before, or whatever. To me it just felt shimmed-in, like the producers were worried that having an opening scene that set up characters, without any violence, would lose viewers before the central conflict set in. I guess that may be true, but I still think it sucks a little. Don’t waste my time with scenes that aren’t going to be germane to the story, however well done they are. |
Funny...he doesn't look like a sick motherfucker...
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To sum up, here is the text I sent Angela after I watched the film:
“It’s extremely well-made. Technically adroit. Just fucking mean.”
Watch at your own discretion.
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