Captive (2020) We seriously debated with ourselves whether it was worth a precious 90 minutes of our life to spend it on yet another massively obscure independent horror movie.........
We shrugged and plunged in, promising ourself that we'd bail out if it became too tiresomely generic....
It definitely threatened to. An unhappy teen girl (Tori Kostic), fleeing her abusive father, gets separated from her boyfriend and lost in the woods......
She stumbles on to a house in that all-time favorite horror movie location, The Middle Of Frickin' Nowhere. Unfortunately for her, it's occupied by a completely deranged middle ager (William Kircher) who's so off his meds, he mistakes her for his own teen daughter, who (surprise, surprise) also fled home.....from her abusive father.
Psycho-Daddy drove his estranged daughter bonkers and out of the house by obsessively micro-managing and training her for some sort of championship athletic career....(Olympic? College sports? Dancing With The Stars? Who knows?)
So, our luckless lost-in-the-woods-girl now finds herself a prisoner and subjected to the same kind of forced physical abuse she ran away from, only this time employed by a loon obsessed with treadmills and sit-ups......
Young Kostic and Kircher really go all in playing out this captivity scenario....and eventually you start to believe it when Kostic slowly but surely accumulates enough Stockholm Syndrome to believe she's really transformed into Kircher's surrogate daughter......(and it's implied he'd kidnapped other potential daughter--wanna-bees, who came to bad ends....maybe they couldn't hack the sit-ups...)..
This is where we sighed and prepared ourselves for the usual grim downbeat ending......which would no doubt involve somebody's death...(or deaths.)
But nothing quite prepared us for the wild card twist that this movies comes up with for its finale.
Thinking about it in retrospect, the ending seems almost inevitable in a way, but still packs quite a startling punch. And it tops off the movie nicely......
There's not nearly enough carnage here for hardcore gorehounds, but if you're a fan of off-the-beaten-track psychological thrillers, you might give this one a try. It made us NOT regret the 90 minutes, so for that (and the two effective, committed actors)....3 stars. (***)
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