Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.5
Overall		2.0

The Captive Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 6, 2015

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. At the time of the release of The Sweet Hereafter (still oddly missing on a bonafide domestic Blu-ray release), writer-director Atom Egoyan was hailed as one of the new giants of cinema, especially after the triumph of Egoyan’s previous film, Exotica. Since The Sweet Hereafter, though, Egoyan’s output has been variable at best, and in some cases stupefyingly mundane and tired. That unfortunately is largely the case with The Captive, an at times ludicrously over convoluted thriller that, like The Sweet Hereafter, traffics in a frigid ambience, both externally courtesy of a snowbound environment as well as internally courtesy of a gaggle of wounded, often desperate, individuals. The plot hinges upon one of the worst nightmares of any parent, the disappearance and probable kidnapping of a child, and then further hinges upon what is probably the second worst nightmare of any parent, finding out years later that the kid may in fact be alive, held captive by a crazed individual who has probably been indulging in child sexual abuse.

Egoyan has always preferred to be a deconstructionist, offering his stories in chunks or even sometimes in dribs and drabs that don’t necessarily follow a traditional chronology, something that allows events to collide up against each other in sometimes unexpected ways. The problem with that approach is that there needs to be something to deconstruct, and in the case of The Captive, it is unfortunately a story of such essential tawdriness that eventually includes such a high level of conspiratorial fervor that suspension of disbelief just ups and disappears after a little while.

The basic setup of The Captive is simplicity itself, and in fact a lot of the film’s undeniably disturbing emotional content rests with this ultimate simplicity: a down on his luck landscaper named Matthew Lane (Ryan Reynolds) is driving back home through isolated snowy roads with his cute little 9 year old daughter Cass (Peyton Kennedy) when he decides to stop at a roadside joint and buy a pie. He jaunts inside the place for just a moment, but when he returns, Cass has disappeared (in a kind of child-centric version of similarly mysterious disappearance in The Vanishing).

Much like some of the devastated parents in Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter, that leaves Matthew and his distraught wife Tina (Mireille Enos) in a purgatory of guilt and recriminations. Despite the jigsaw puzzle storytelling style, Egoyan actually reveals Cass’ fate relatively early on, albeit from the vantage point of several years down the road. Cass is indeed alive as a teenager (now played by Alexia Fast), held in a bedroom like prison by a creepy pervert named Mika (Kevin Durand).

The Captive lapses into near camp territory once it’s further revealed that Mika has had the wherewithal to not just kidnap Cass, but to set up a high tech surveillance system through which he has continued to torment Tina by offering her little tidbits from her missing daughter’s life. That ridiculously improbable scenario is countered by a completely needless subplot involving sex crimes investigator Nicole (Rosario Dawson), who herself is kidnapped in one of this film’s most perplexingly absurd sidebars.

It’s a bit hard to know exactly what Egoyan was going for in The Captive. This plays almost like a Law and Order: SVU episode refracted through the sensibilities of some Art House philosopher like Alain Resnais, except that Egoyan offers none of the substance nor frankly little of the filmmaking craft that suffuses any given Resnais outing. The Captive often feels like a jumbled mess, something that its kaleidoscopic narrative style only exacerbates.

None other than the iconic William Wyler was able to subtly invest his film about a captor and his unfortunate victim, The Collector, with a palpable sense of dread and foreboding, especially as the “relationship” between the pair morphed into something even more troubling than it started out as being. Egoyan shies away from any depth in this central part of the story, leaving the teenaged Cass as a kind of slightly withdrawn Valley Girl who doesn’t seem all that bothered by the fact that she’s a prisoner. Egoyan tips the scales in the other direction with regard to Matthew and Tina, offering an often hyperbolic depiction of two parents trying to recover their daughter while working through levels of distrust and angst with each other. It’s therefore a largely unbalanced presentation, one that fails to find any secure emotional connection with its audience, leaving the viewer to feel like they’ve been stranded out on a snowy road in the middle of nowhere with no cinematic compass to guide them home.

The Captive Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Captive is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Lionsgate Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.40:1. This feature was digitally shot with the Arri Alexa, and a quite impressive range of tones in various shades of white offer a suitably bleak, wintry look to several key sequences. In fact a lot of the exterior footage here is decidedly (and no doubt intentionally) on the drab or monochromatic side of things, seeming to echo the barren emotional lives of Matthew and Tina. When pops of color do emerge, as in Nicole's stunning red evening gown at a hoity toity soirée, they look incredibly vivid simply by dint of the fact that they're generally surrounded by shades of white, beige or brown. Detail is quite commendable throughout the presentation, easily handling resolution of elements like steam in the frigid wintry air, or the prickly beard hairs on Matthew's face. Contrast is solid, though as I tend to be with some digitally shot features, I wasn't totally convinced by levels of shadow detail and even general detail in some dimly lit interior scenes. There are no compression artifacts of any note, nor any problems with image instability.

The Captive Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Captive features a rather restrained though at times nicely nuanced lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix. There's not a lot of sonic data here to exploit a really forceful surround experience, but exterior scenes feature good placement of ambient environmental effects, and there's also good attention paid to the differing ambiences of exterior and interior spaces. Dialogue is very cleanly presented throughout the film, and Mychael Danna's overwrought score also wafts through the surrounds.

The Captive Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Audio Commentary with Writer/Director Atom Egoyan


• Captive Thoughts (1080p; 8:49) is the requisite EPK, with snippets from the film interspersed with interviews.


• Alternate Ending (1080p; 1:51)


• Deleted Scenes (1080p; 13:56)

The Captive Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Captive actually ends up being a rather sad viewing experience, though not necessarily due to anything being portrayed on screen. It's simply hard to fathom what possibly could have motivated Egoyan to make such a largely dispiriting and chaotic feeling film. The cast does what it can with the material, but when you have an actor like Durand going off the rails with the Queen of the Night aria from The Magic Flute, you know you're into near camp territory, not exactly a good thing for a supposed thriller with "deep" psychological subtexts. Technical merits are generally very strong for those considering a purchase.