The Captive, Atom Egoyan

May 23,2024

No stranger to treating lurid and uninviting subjects in a chilly fashion, Atom Egoyan’s glacial style of filmmaking has always been both a blessing and a curse. While his distant rendering of melancholy in The Sweet Hereafter— regarded by many as his masterpiece — allowed for a quietly devastating examination of mourning, his arctic methods can tend to distract from the psychological value of his films, as was the case in Where the Truth Lies. Egoyan’s reputation has waned in the past decade, with many of his recent feature films — perhaps most notoriously the disastrous Chloe— failing to dazzle critics and audiences. Sadly, The Captive is not likely to buck that trend. Premiering at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year as part of a competition lineup criticized by many as too routinely composed of favorite auteurs of the festival’s past, one finds it difficult to imagine that a film as derivative as this one would have been included had a big directorial name not been attached to it. Released just over a year after Egoyan’s fellow Canadian Denis Villeneuve unleashed his perversely entertaining Prisoners upon us, The Captive feels particularly indebted to that film’s politics and provocation. Set in a small rural town, it chronicles the […]