Review by Ben Bussey
It feels strange to be finally catching up with one of the best horror films of its year several years after its initial release. When the screener arrived for Kidnapped I’d all but forgotten the praise it first attracted in 2011; Nia caught it at BIFFF, Steph at FrightFest, and our old buddy Marc on its US DVD release, and their response was unanimously positive. Quite why it’s taken this long for Miguel Angel Vivas’s breakthrough film to get a UK release, I couldn’t imagine – but in a way, I’m quite pleased it was delayed. By 2011, I was just exhausted with ordeal movies; it seemed like every new horror that came along was nothing but home invasion, humiliation, rape, balaclavas and bloodied people tied to chairs, or some combination thereof. Had I seen Kidnapped under those circumstances, having lost whatever taste I might have had for that brand of intense horror, I suspect I would have dismissed it offhand, thrown it under the bus with the rest of the torture porn. And I would’ve been dead wrong to do so. There is very little that’s particularly pleasant about Kidnapped, but as an exercise in sheer, unrelenting terror and despair, it’s something very special indeed.
A family’s first night in their nice, new, relatively secluded home turns into a living nightmare when three masked man break in. That’s really all you need to know plot-wise, and I won’t say any more for a couple of reasons: firstly, because this is one of those films that surely works best if you go in as good as blind (I’m not embedding any of the too-revealing-for-my-liking trailers on this page for that very reason); and secondly because, broken down in a matter-of-fact, beat-for-beat way, you might think Kidnapped offered nothing you haven’t seen before. Indeed, from a certain point of view it really doesn’t; like I said, ordeals and home invasions have been ten-a-penny in horror this past decade, and from a narrative perspective Miguel Angel Vivas’s film doesn’t really take us anywhere especially new. But it’s all in the execution (I suppose there could be a pun there). It may not be a ground-breaker in terms of storytelling, but as a testament to the power of excellent direction and acting, Kidnapped is damn near impossible to find fault in.
In common with most home invasion films, the action is largely confined to the family home, with a core cast of six: Fernando Cayo, Ana Wagener and Manuela Vellés as the parents and teenage daughter, and Guillermo Barrientos, Dritan Biba and Martijn Kuiper as their assailants. Vivas’s masterstroke is to keep the editing minimal, the camera moving with the action in a series of very long takes, with very few noticeable cuts; I didn’t try and keep track, but according to Nia the film is literally 12 shots in total. I guess now we’d call that shooting Alfonso Cuaron style, but where Cuaron tends to emphasise depth in wide-open spaces, Vivas keeps it all very intimate – uncomfortably so, in fact. Once we realise there isn’t going to be a cut, we’re left that bit less comfortable once things start getting rough, and – if you’re anything like me – you may find yourself inwardly begging for the cut to come, and the moment to pass. But Vivas isn’t letting us off that easy.
Still, none of this is to say the film has a too-real, quasi-documentary style: the look of the film is very slick and filmic, beautifully shot and lit with judicious use of music (as Marc noted, it doesn’t feel too far removed from the French extreme cinema of recent years). And, in an interesting move, Vivas keeps the pace up by occasional use of split-screen; while this old technique very often seems a bit kitsch, here it’s used to remarkable effect, allowing us to keep up with parallel action and ensuring the film never loses momentum.
I suppose some may grumble at the use of Eastern-European immigrants as the antagonists, breaking into the comfortable home of a native Spanish family with seemingly no motive other than money. But really, any political overtones tend to remain in the background. In the tradition of the finest, purest horror, the primary concern in Kidnapped is always the protagonists and their desperation to escape with their lives. It may fall back on some tried-and-tested conventions and character tropes in doing so, but it’s played in such a raw, naturalistic fashion that it takes the viewer right along with them on their downward spiral into hell. The result is a film which, in many ways, is hard to recommend, as it’s far from a barrel of laughs, and it won’t leave you in an especially upbeat mood; but if you’re after something harsh, visceral and unrelenting to squeeze your psyche through a potato ricer of catharsis, Kidnapped needs to go straight onto your to-view list.
Kidnapped is released to DVD and download on 13th October 2014, from Icon.