A rich man's daughter is held captive in an abandoned apartment by two former convicts who abducted her and hold her ransom in exchange for her father's money.
19 Feb The Disappearance of Alice Creed (2009)
Expectations
No one can know, can they? But we always seek to.
This small project explores that notion. It is highly abstract: there are four characters, three of whom we see. There is a literal and disturbing kidnapping, but this connects because the universal analogies are more real. You can get the story from other writers; what interests me is the way the narrative teases out these tensions in us.
The basic framework is love, what relationships mean and what we can expect. We have the love within two couples and a father-daughter relationship. All of these share a member with another. All are or get broken during this tragedy of the Shakespearean style. There is dominance and submission, trust and suspicion, the allure of sweet futures and painful present.
So far so good. I recommend this to you because of its extreme economy and heavy reliance on the cinematic vocabulary. The opening sequence is wonderful; we see planning for something that is so detailed and assured that we know that if something in the world we see breaks, it will break an ordered universe. This world has engines that drive it and clear roles for those in it — at least to start.
And then we start getting surprised; the surprises are when the relationships are revealed, and then we see the tragic machinery start to grind lives away. The DVD I saw had the storyboards. These are remarkable, and show that the filmmaker knows his movie stuff and has some vision into what makes us tick. No, that is probably not right. He has some insight into how we think we tick, and that is more effective.
Well done. The ending is not as well conceived as the rest of it, but it is good enough, a flavour of ‘Rififi‘ and ‘the Aura,‘ as reflected in the name of the title character.
Posted in 2011
Ted’s Evaluation — 3 of 3: Worth watching.
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