Kidnapped

More than 3 million homes are raided every year in Europe. That’s one every ten seconds. Using these overwhelming numbers, Vivas anchors his awaited return to filmmaking in a family’s home: that intimate and particularly vulnerable place where everyday fears can become more real and deep. It’s precisely in the luxurious home where Jaime, Marta and their daughter Isa moved in that a violent tour de force takes place right as they were getting ready to celebrate with champagne. The three hooded men who have broken into their home are looking for money, of course; but something else as well. Tense, dry, physical, made with less than ten shots, and lacking any musical underlying, Kidnapped is less an update of Wyler’s The Desperate Hours than a direct heir of Haneke’s Funny Games and the distressing The Strangers: a somber look at a world of threatened privilege in which the present shows its cracks and the immediate future is pure uncertainty. –Mar del Plata International Film Festival