Carl Kozlowski has been a professional film critic and essayist for the past five years at Pasadena Weekly, in addition to the Christian movie site Movieguide.
He also writes in-depth celebrity interviews for Esquire. He is owner of the podcasting site www. He lives in Los Angeles. Night Shyamalan. The result is smartly written and expertly acted by James McAvoy as the kidnapper who displays eight personas in the course of the film, and Anna Taylor-Joy as Casey, the girl who is the sharpest at fighting back. The film opens with three teenage girls β Casey, Marcia Jessica Sula and Claire Haley Lu Richardson β as they wait in a car for one of their fathers outside a shopping mall.
But instead of the dad showing up, a creepy stranger McAvoy slides behind the wheel, dons a mask to cover his face and mouth, and knocks all three girls out with a spray. They awaken in a creepy underground lair and soon realize that the creep has a never-ending change of personalities ranging from a mentally challenged man named Hedwig to an upper-crust British woman named Patricia.
As Marcia and Claire freak out and attempt their own futile escapes, Casey manages to know how to manipulate his mind and gather clues that might add up to saving her life. The reason that Casey is better prepared than her friends stems from her creepy childhood, in which a sleazy uncle tricked her into being sexually abused as a young girl. Adding an extra level of intrigue is the presence of Dr. There is one mostly heard but cut-off use of the "MF" word, and four mild swears, and while there's no sex or nudity, the teen girls are forced to wear bras and panties for good portions of the running time by their kidnapper.
This is presented in straightforward scary, not overly prurient fashion, however. To be fair, the final ten minutes deliver a powerful coda to the film, as we come to learn where the girls have been held captive and find that there are two final twists. Night Shyamalan fans. Both are among the heaviest movies of the past year, deep dramas offering painful looks at people under remarkable duress. Ferreira has disappeared while evangelizing in Japan, yet while many other missionaries were known to have been martyred for their efforts, rumor has it that Ferreira renounced Jesus and the Catholic Church and is surviving as a now-married man.
