Captive, The

Synopsis: One winter afternoon in northern Ontario, Matthew (Ryan Reynolds) collects his daughter from ice-skating practice and on the way home drops into a pie shop to pick up dinner. When he returns to his truck she has gone. The police believe that she has been kidnapped by a paedophile ring.

Thrillers commonly rely on contrivances that stretch the laws of probability to breaking point. Canadian director Atom Egoyan goes one step further and fractures the narrative's temporal logic. Improbability is is one thing, intentional obfuscation entirely another.

Playing with chronology is by no means a rare or even unpalatable way to enhance  mystery, the point being to engage us in its solution. Egoyan however only manages to create confusion, switching from one time period to another with no point or even indicators so that by the film’s end, any emotional investment is completely negated.

Not that there is a lot to work with. Whilst the core subject matter, the evil abduction of children and the destructive effect on the parents (subject matter that Egoyan visited in his previous film, Devil’s Knot) does immediately engage our sympathies, and indeed, sustains us through Egoyan’s obstacle race, what initially suggests a promising drama quickly morphs into some kind of televisual police procedural with a villainous mastermind with apparently unlimited resources and Rosario Dawson as the hottest cop since Jamie Lee Curtis in Blue Steel, aided by a knuckle-headed colleague (Scott Speedman) whose investigative techniques beggar belief. Matthew’s wife, Tina (Mireille Enos) inexplicably blames her husband for leaving their daughter in the car and is wont to believe the knucklehead’s suggestion that he sold the child to paedophiles because his landscaping business was going bad.

Yes, it's a lame script but it really is pointless to enumerate all the non sequitors required to make the narrative work, both in enabling the psychotic perp. (a very creepy Kevin Durand) in the first place and then catching him in the second. Suffice to say that you’d be struggling to count them on both hands.

The film looks good with DOP Paul Sarossy using the pristine snow-covered landscape to good effect and Reynolds and Enos both deliver solid performances within the limitations of the script. There is powerful material here (of a nature much more effectively realized by Denis Villeneuve in his 2013 film Prisoners) but the once-celebrated Egoyan has squandered it with seemingly suicidal perversity. It is hard to believe that he could fall any further from grace,

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