Critics reviews

The truth is that Egoyan's the same director he's always been, just as in love with jagged edges and bizarre turns as ever. "The Captive" may appear to bite off a little more than it can chew but it's one of the most satisfyingly baroque thrillers of the year, and thanks to a perfectly judged performance by Ryan Reynolds, it's quietly heartbreaking, too.

Filmed in Northern Ontario and Niagara Falls, N.Y., "The Captive" seems tailor-made to explore the psychological damage that a child can suffer over a lengthy confinement, but instead leans too heavily on the chilly desolation of Paul Sarossy's cinematography. What's going on in the victim's mind, or anyone else's, is as invisible as what lies beneath the snow.

Hands down the dumbest movie Egoyan has ever made... The more details that emerge from the fog, the sillier everyone's private pain becomes, predicated as it is on utter nonsense. This was never a problem back in the 1980s and 1990s, because Egoyan fashioned scenarios so absurdist that they had only a tangential relationship to real-world behavior. Here, by contrast, he's trafficking in overly familiar tropes involving cops, grieving relatives, and criminal masterminds, and the idiocy sticks.

What could Egoyan have been thinking? Reynolds and especially Enos are convincing as hell, but the all-too-real nightmare scenario hardly mixes with the nutty side dish of Feuillade's Les Vampires. Maybe the director's commentary on the DVD will make it all clear.

Egoyan mistakes maddening vagueness for ambiguity, diddling around with gimmicky elisions when he should be refining his focus on character behavior. The filmmaker's so busy trying to transcend his material that he inadvertently courts inhumanity: He turns Cass into a sleepy-eyed "symbol" of something-or-another and denies her the stature of her pain.

The Internet and cyber-technology play a pivotal role in the film's plot, but none of the characters that are specialists in these fields seem especially competent. This could pertain to the mostly hidden sect of child pornographers as well, especially the comically maniacal baddie played by Kevin Durand. His thin mustache marks his nefarious character as evil but the man himself is a constant psychological conundrum.

The problem here isn't that a work of trash is incapable of ideas or art. It's that Egoyan doesn't integrate the ideas into the plot. He hasn't known what to do with theory in almost 20 years. It just sits there on the surface. It's as if he's working out trauma he isn't truly prepared or equipped to explore.

Many will lambast the film's intentionally stilted performances and hammy tone, but its most egregious flaws are located in the script, which, among many flaws, exhibits a lack of understanding in the way the internet actually works – incredibly bizarre, coming from a filmmaker who's made so many films (including this one) ostensibly about the internet.

Too abstract to work provocatively as genre, and too generic to explore its thesis tying crime to media storytelling, empathy, and exploitation, the film's saving grace ironically turns out to be its anomalous, over-the-top villain. Kevin Durand is so grotesquely physically insinuating, pallid, slimily mustached and bizarrely affected that he broadcasts "tortuous pervert" in every frame of the film...

Expect this film to put some backs up (it took some boos at the press screening) because Egoyan has made a teasing and playful puzzler out of something horrifying: a case of child abduction and imprisonment with grim echoes of the Fritzl case... It could be accused of trivialising the unthinkable, but this genre thriller with an arthouse twist is Egoyan's strongest in a while.

A lazily plotted and largely generic thriller, leading man Ryan Reynolds seizes yet another opportunity to tackle a darker, contemplative role while Egoyan's cerebral efforts only serve to underscore the by-the-books melodrama. They only emerge unscathed because "The Captive" is so forgettable.

The Captive is fascinating in its close focus on the mental scarring associated with this type of abuse, but it's also unbearably manipulative and heavy-handed. When the script eventually runs out of steam, Egoyan, in his rush to bring things to a neat, satisfactory conclusion, leaves too many loose ends and too many questions unanswered, and his film is consequently relegated to third tier pulp thriller.