The Captive - Blu-ray

Movie: A brief moment of carelessness can destroy the lives of an entire family: On her way home from skating practice, young Cassandra (Peyton Kennedy) is kidnapped right out of her father Matthew's (Ryan Reynolds) car while he's out shopping for dinner. That was eight years ago. Meanwhile, Matthew and Tina's (Mireille Enos) marriage has suffered seemingly irreparable damage amid grief, ignorance and recriminations. And investigating detectives Nicole and Jeffrey (Rosario Dawson and Scott Speedman) have so far failed to track down the kidnapper - especially as Jeffrey is convinced that the father is the real culprit. But then they discover the face of Cassie (Alexia Fast), who has now grown into a young woman, on a relevant website. Now begins a race against time to free the girl from a nightmare more terrible than her parents dare to imagine.

With The Captive, Canadian director Atom Egoyan has staged a thematically very uncomfortable thriller that tells its story very quietly and not very strikingly, but still extremely involving. This is achieved firstly by the puzzle-like structure of the story, which repeatedly switches back and forth between several time levels. Although date inserts indicate these time jumps, the viewer's full attention is still required to follow this non-linear structure of the story. The intense imagery of the film, which was shot in the Niagara Falls and Toronto areas among others, also contributes greatly to building a tense atmosphere that is hard to escape.

And finally, there are the actors, all of whom deliver very good performances. Kevin Durand (Lost, Wolverine) in particular leaves a lasting impression in a disturbing way. Egoyan, with the help of first-rate camerawork and his fine actors, manages to shock and stir without actually showing anything shocking. The real horror of this extremely dark story takes place primarily in the minds of the audience, which makes the thriller very intense despite a certain slowness and restraint.

Surely, The Captive is not necessarily easy fare for a wider audience, but rather a sophisticated thriller-drama for those viewers who value substance over pace and action. The film absolutely lives up to its claim almost to the end. However, the finale comes off a bit too slick and too simply structured to stand up to the previous build-up of tension. The ending isn't really bad, but it just plays it too safe, causing much of the previous intensity to simply fizzle out.

Never the less, Atom Egoyan has directed a thrilling, stirring and atmospheric thriller in many ways that lingers for a long time. Who can get involved in the convoluted and worn staging and who is not automatically bored by a throttled narrative pace should definitely give this film a chance. Worth seeing!

Picture + Sound: The image of the Blu-ray convinces with an extremely atmospheric color scheme and a good matching image sharpness. The fact that the image now and then seems a bit soft-drawn, is a deliberately used stylistic device and is therefore not rated as a weakness of the technical implementation. Overall, a very positive overall impression prevails, which also applies to the restrained, but very atmospheric DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix. Good!

Extras: As a bonus, the disc has, in addition to the trailer and some uncommented B-roll footage from the filming (approx. 7:34 min.), interviews with director Atom Egoyan (approx. 4:48 min.), as well as the actors Kevin Durand (ca. 1:59 min.), Mireille Enos (ca. 5:20 min.), Rosario Dawson (ca. 2:52 min.), Ryan Reynolds (ca. 5:14 min.) and Scott Speedman (ca. 3:30 min.). Overall, very standard promo fare.

Conclusion: The Captive is a gritty thriller drama that tells its disturbing story as a cleverly constructed puzzle. The Blu-ray presents the quiet but very intense drama in atmospheric picture and sound quality. The bonus material is qualitative as quantitative a bit thin, but this hardly diminishes the positive overall impression of the disc. Recommendable

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp