Z/Web

A bit of a different thriller: a top child psychiatrist’s daughter is kidnapped in order to force him to get information from a mentally unstable patient. It’s all about money, of course: the girl doesn’t even realize she knows where the money is hidden. But I liked the aspect of a different kind of pressure on the psychiatrist. He’s got to get through to the patient and find the information in her head, and he’s got to do it in one day or else his own daughter will be killed. Good performances and direction, and the suspense and action isn’t bad, but ultimately the psychology’s thin. Of course the patient is “cured” during the process, and a lot of the trauma she supposedly suffers from is muddled and nonsensical. For example, she is aware that people want this information from her (she tells the doctor, “You want what they want.”) but at the same time she’s supposedly doesn’t know what information she’s hiding. How can you consciously hide something you’re not aware you possess? As usual in these kind of movies, the cure happens too quickly, and the root cause of the girl’s mental problems seems weak. Of course psychology’s always intimate, so it’s difficult for an outsider to judge. For instance, if a guy’s insanely terrified of butterflies and we find out that was caused by him accidentally stepping on one as a child, that sounds stupid. But who knows? For him, that could have been an extremely traumatic event, and maybe an event linked with other intense emotions (like guilt over his parents divorce happening at the time) and it sent him over the edge. But on screen it could seem weak. Like in this case, it’s caused by her witnessing her father’s death as a child. Yes, that’s a traumatic event, but we knew that at the beginning of the film. If that had been kept a secret and we drew it out of her at a climatic point in the film, that’d be one thing, but “revealing” something we already know was weak. Overall, still an above average film.