By Keri O’Shea
Saw has a lot to answer for, doesn’t it? Since it appeared a little over a decade ago, it’s had a long-lasting and far-reaching impact on horror – for good, and for ill. Saw showed us that a horror story could be effective and gripping whilst being incredibly economical with characters and settings; by the by, and this is something that the team behind Saw can’t have predicted and shouldn’t be blamed for, it has convinced an army of low-budget filmmakers that they can do the same – that a horror story can unfold in a single room, with a small number of characters, and if Saw can do it – so can they! Here’s the rub – that confidence is often very, very misplaced. Which brings us to Captive (2015). Captive’s DVD release is proudly emblazoned with an (unattributed) cover quote which describes the film as a “cult gem in the same vein as Saw”. I don’t know who said that and I’d like to ask them a few things, but it would be more accurate to say that Captive is a brazen and mystifying attempt to re-frame Saw on a shoestring budget, and one which fails on every single score.
The plot hardly needs describing, given the above, but I’ll give it a whirl: we start with a room full of dead bodies, though with a couple of people left alive who are communicating with a mysterious someone via mobile phone (sound familiar?). They’ve decided to disguise their voice so thoroughly you can barely make out what they’re saying, which could have put a crimp in the plot, but basically it’s something about the people who are left having to follow commands to kill one another, which perhaps clues you in to why there are so many corpses in this particular dimly-lit room. You know where we’re going from here – yes, back in time, where we see some folks in HAZMAT gear dragging the inmates into the room, where they duly wake up and start wondering why they’re there. Whoever has put them there wants them to work out why they’ve been chosen, as well as spicing things up by getting them to bump one another off from time to time.
Oh, and there’s another element to the plot, too: apparently this is set in the future, a future where people are still using analogue alarm clocks and wearing clothes which are utterly in keeping with the current times, but yeah, this is the future, and the inmates have a virus. A virus! This manifestly contributes no originality to the film as a whole, but allows some very limited SFX at least, because viruses in these films always justify contact lenses/colouring in the eyes during post-production.
I don’t honestly enjoy tearing a film to shreds: I’d much prefer to be able to find something good to say about a film if someone’s bothered to get it made in the first place, but I can honestly think of nothing complimentary to say about Captive other than that the cast seem to be genuinely trying to inject some life into the film – even to the point of near-parodic scenery-chewing – and might have got somewhere, had they been given a script which didn’t ask them to repeatedly yell “We have to get out of here!” and other such ‘no shit, Sherlock’ moments throughout. The camera-work is dire (laughably filming through a HAZMAT mask to represent the point-of-view of the mysterious experimenters; using a zoom shot which then goes out of focus), the actors are not adequately miked up (everything echoes throughout) and the editing is a series of clunky physical jerks which can’t hide the fact that this plot is far, far too thin for a feature-length, especially considering it’s already been done more than once, and properly.
Indie cinema can be superb. It can be a space for resilient and resourceful filmmakers to tell stories without any of the pressures of big studios who demand tried-and-tested cinematic conventions; it can be innovative, refreshing and life-affirming. Or, it can be a cheap and nasty waste of time stemming from incomprehensible motivation and, in the case of the horror genre, startlingly cynical laziness – and it seems director and writer Stephen Patrick Kenny has form in this respect. There is nothing about Captive I can possibly recommend to anyone who enjoys film.
Captive is available on DVD now.