ABDUCTED (2013)

Studio:       Entertainment One
Director:    Glen Scantlebury, Lucy Phillips
Writer:       Glen Scantlebury, Lucy Phillips
Producer:  John Hamilton, Lucy Phillips, Glen Scantlebury
Stars:     Trevor Morgan, Tessa Ferrer, Ross Thomas, Jelly Howie, Aidan Park, Vivan Dugre, Doug Haley, Emily Graham-Handley, May Turnure

Review Score: 

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Summary:

Four kidnapped couples struggle to survive while unraveling the mystery of their captors’ identities and motives. 

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Dave Roberts and his girlfriend Jessica Marino enjoy a Los Angeles vacation. While picnicking in Griffith Park, they are knocked out by darts fired from the distance. Dave regains consciousness at night and sees Jessica being taken away. Dave attempts to flee while on his cell phone with a 911 operator, but he is hit by another tranquilizer and captured. Jessica and Dave later wake and find themselves trapped in a darkened room.

During their first day of captivity, Dave and Jessica learn that their captors do not speak. The abductors wear containment suits and breathe with a vaguely animal sound. Water and protein bars are pushed under the door for sustenance. The captors regularly gas the prisoners and handle them with metal rods and pincers. A security camera watches them at all times. The couple is allowed to have their cell phones, but they have limited functionality and no reception. Jessica receives a text message that reads, “No escape. Resistance = death.” She and Dave begin recording video journals on their phones. A red light occasionally pulses, seemingly to frustrate the hostages.

Dave and Jessica are gassed. Jessica wakes to discover that Dave is missing from the room. She also finds a strange hole carved into her back between the shoulders. She begins feeling strange inside her body. Dave regains consciousness in a room where the words “kill the child” are scrawled on a wall. He also finds a severed human ear in one of the corners.

Jessica wakes on a hospital gurney with an IV needle in her arm. An immobile captor wearing a HAZMAT suit lies on the ground. Jessica sneaks past him and finds a control room. A computer screen shows a news report about the Taliban being suspected in the kidnapping of a general’s daughter. Jessica also sees a young girl sleeping in an adjacent room before being recaptured and returned to the room with Dave. Dave now has the same wound on his neck. He and Jessica come to believe that they were kidnapped by terrorists because of Jessica’s connection to her military father.

After several days of captivity, a new couple is imprisoned in the same room as Dave and Jessica. Justin and Summer were also kidnapped in Griffith Park, despite knowing that two other couples had already gone missing. They also have no idea who took them or why.

Jessica wakes on day six and discovers that she is alone again in the room. In another room, one of the captors operates on Dave. When Dave is returned to Jessica, they find a scar on his side and suspect that Dave’s kidney was removed.

Another couple is placed in the room. Maria is catatonic from her experience. Elliot tells Dave and Jessica that they were captured intentionally because they believe that aliens are abducting people from Griffith Park. Elliot theorizes that males are the chosen ones and females are used as egg farms.

On day seven, Dave and Jessica stage a pretend marriage. In frustration, Dave pulls down a pipe that starts filling the room with gas. When a captor enters, Dave hits him with the pipe while he and Jessica escape into the hallway. They find another couple, Buzz and Tiffany, but more captors arrive and taze Dave until both couples are imprisoned together.

Buzz reveals that his phone still has Internet access. Buzz and Tiffany believe that they are part of a secret government conspiracy to create a superhuman. Among other things, they point out that none of them ever have to go to the bathroom, their hair no longer grows, and their phones always have full power. Using Buzz’s phone, Dave logs in to Facebook to update his status, prompting the captors to attack. Following the encounter, Buzz treats Dave and Jessica as enemies.

After another gassing, Dave and Jessica find themselves alone again. Jessica believes that the little girl she saw must be their captors’ child since they are only kidnapping couples. Dave admits that when they were first abducted, he ran away while trying to phone 911. Feeling like he would have abandoned her, Jessica stops speaking to Dave.

Maria is placed into the room with Dave and Jessica on day nine. Dave and Jessica eventually make up. They occupy their time by playing with a bug in their room. Maria discusses her UFO conspiracy theories. She tells the couple that they are on a spaceship. Maria also claims that their alien captors wear gas masks and do not touch them because of a fear of human viruses.

Jessica and Maria both end up with the same kidney scar as Dave. The captors deliver a box of real food to the women, but only Jessica is willing to eat it. Jessica finds a spot in the room where her phone has reception. She connects briefly with her mother and with her friend Christy. Maria admonishes Jessica for not calling 911 instead.

Jessica wakes restrained to a chair. She pulls a tube from the hole in her neck after freeing herself. A captor enters the room and she attacks him. While hiding, she finds Summer’s dead body. Jessica then rescues Maria and arms herself with a fire axe. She swings when someone approaches and inadvertently kills the little girl from earlier. The girl bleeds green liquid. Jessica and Maria are gassed again.

Dave and Justin are alone on day 45. They create a plan to subdue a captor and flee. After knocking out the abductor, Dave unmasks him and sees that he appears human, but he is afflicted with an unknown disease. Another captor stops experimenting on Tiffany to chase Dave and Justin. Justin is killed, but Dave escapes. Dave finds Elliot. Elliot tells Dave that Maria died and that he believes their abductors are human-alien hybrids.

Elliot is captured while Dave makes another escape. Dave subdues another captor and unmasks him as Buzz, whose skin shows the same affliction as the earlier man. Tiffany dies on her operating table. Dave sees a green fluid being fed into her body intravenously.

Dave finally rescues Jessica. They escape the building to discover that they are still in Los Angeles (Linda Vista Hospital). Jessica is mysteriously three months pregnant. Abductors surround them and take the couple prisoner again.

Three Months Later – Dave and Jessica drive a van through Los Angeles. Dave’s hand shows signs of the same disease that their abductors had. Jessica holds a baby in the passenger seat.

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Review:

What makes “Abducted” intriguing as held hostage horror and as a medical experiment thriller is the breadcrumb trail that judiciously doles out teases of tension with the jigsaw pieces slowly given to its characters.  Like “The Strangers” staging a home invasion, the captors in “Abducted” never speak and never offer a motive for their actions.  That mystery is left for the abductees to uncover and for the audience to interpret.

Dave and Jessica are a young and in love vacationing couple enjoying a picnic in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park that is suddenly interrupted by poison darts to their backs.  They then wake as captives in a cold, dark room.  But there is no saw or a tape recorder waiting on the floor for them.  The couple instead discovers that their captors are strange men in gas masks and containment suits.  Never speaking, the only noise the abductors make is a Predator-like animal breathing, and their interest is in biological experiments, not in delivering answers.

Over the course of their imprisonment, Dave and Jessica meet a trio of couples in the same situation.  Collectively, they become known as the Griffith Park 8.  Since her father is a military general in Afghanistan, Jessica and Dave come to believe that they have been kidnapped by the Taliban.  Teens Justin and Summer wonder if their parents staged a boot camp intervention or if they are being held for ransom because of Justin’s Hollywood family.  Buzz and Tiffany think they are part of a covert government experiment.  Meanwhile, Elliot and Maria are certain that they have all been abducted by aliens.

The thriller unfolds as the captives resist their captors, frantically search for answers, and fight to hold on to their depleting sanity while the days held prisoner turn into weeks and odd bodily scars begin multiplying.  “Abducted” has a game plan in mind for unleashing suspense, and it is mostly successful in capturing the mood it sets out to create.

“Abducted” boasts an impressive cast of young talent, some of whom are familiar faces in genre entertainment.  Memorable for his turn as misguided sociopath Renfield in the 2011 film “Vampire” (review here), Trevor Morgan leads the way as Dave.  “Grey’s Anatomy” actress Tessa Ferrer is at his side as Jessica.  Natural banter establishes an honest rapport between themselves as well as with the audience.  There is a smartness to their personalities that maintains a heroic light in spite of their occasionally annoying flaws.

The rest of the cast delivers on a similar level.  Other performers would be better suited to ranting about alien abductions while wearing tinfoil hats, but Aidan Park has an authentic presence that lends his conspiracy theorist dialogue a frightening amount of credibility.  These are clearly actors cast for ability alone, and they make a deliberately slow tempo film feel tightly focused and breezy.

“Abducted” does necessitate a commitment not only of patience, but also of a willingness to invest in the outcome.  The story is about isolated couples held hostage for days on end without any hope of rescue or of learning more about the details of their confinement.  By nature, depiction of their prison-like conditions requires multiple scenes of languishing in a barren cell.  It is a necessary evil of storytelling needs conflicting with entertainment goals as some viewers are liable to feel that answers are not coming fast enough to be satisfying.  Admittedly, watching prisoners crouch in fetal positions for extended periods of time can be uneventful if the emotional connection is absent.

At the same time, “Abducted” has an underlying trust pulsing through the script that revelations about what is really happening are coming.  It will not be a simple road to make it there, but it will be suspenseful.  The maddening atmosphere of a mind unraveling due to conditions without explanation is created expertly.  Mood is thick, skin does crawl, and an engaged mind will be wrapped in the events onscreen.  However, such as the movie finally does turn on the light at the end of the tunnel, the final moments can be a letdown for some.  Anyone unable to buy into the premise or care about its conclusion will write the film off as plodding and dull.  And while the merit of the payoff is up for debate, the fact remains that “Abducted” is oozing with compelling takes on themes of kidnapping and medical experimentation fit snugly inside a smartly crafted production.

Review Score:  70

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