Hoooooooooooooooo. A european woman traveling in—not sure, Scotland?—is taken prisoner, tattooed, and subjected to extreme body modification in this captivity flick. Which, for the first half, is every bit as dull as it sounds, because: captivity, torture porn, not interesting.
But, you know what? This is a pretty well-made movie. The characters are paper-thin but the acting and casting are above average and that slides the shallowness of it by better than usual. It takes its time getting where it’s going, but over the second half, ratchets up the dramatic tension.
Basically the whole thing is played like an extremely, EXTREMELY and somewhat gory dark suspense pic or crime thriller, not a horror movie. There are certainly no scares here, and it’s more about the cops circling in on him than torture-as-entertainment, as these films usually are.
Plus, as I said, it’s notably well-made for this sort of movie. If captivity flicks weren’t an extremely exhausted and cheap genre, and this was the first one I’d ever seen, I’d probably have liked this. I bet some people think this is great.
I definitely cannot recommend it. It’s still a captivity flick, more lurid than anything else. It definitely wouldn’t exist without Silence Of The Lambs’s “I’ve got a woman in my basement who I’m doing horrible things to” trope and Saw’s “let’s make this captivity as gratuitously twisted as possible” vibe to pave the way.
But. it’s definitely better than most of the movies that a lot of what could be said about it could be said about. Which is kind of like saying a particular poke in the eye is better than most pokes in the eyes. But, sometimes, maybe you admire the skill with which someone poked you in the eye, maybe? Like, you didn’t like it, but, you have to admit they’re really, really practiced and graceful at poking people in the eye?
I dunno. I would say to anyone, don’t watch it. But, if you do want to watch seriously violent, gory, gratuitously twisted crap, this is way better than most of that crap, I guess? I’d probably mark this as having something a little special about it, even, but I wouldn’t want to seem like I might be recommending it.