REVIEW: DVD Release: Caged
Film: Caged
Release date: 4th April 2011
Certificate: 15
Running time: 80 mins
Director: Yann Gozlan
Starring: Zoé Felix, Eric Savin, Arié Elmaleh, Ivan Franek, Igor Skreblin
Genre: Horror/Thriller
Studio: Optimum
Format: DVD
Country: France
French horror is riding high with output such as the shattering Martyrs and Inside, as well as genre based shockers like Switchblade Romance, Frontier(s) and Satan. Caged comes to us packaged as an accompaniment to such offerings, promising shocks and claustrophobia in spades.
In the countryside, two young girls play hide and seek. Carole goes to seek out her friend, Laura, and finds her dead in a garage, attacked by a dog. The same dog attacks Carole, and she has to hide in a car while the dog claws at the windows and tries to kill her.
Jump forward twenty years and Carole, on a humanitarian mission to an unnamed country in the former Yugoslavia, finishes her service, along with two other doctors, and prepares for the long car journey home. Along the way, they are forced to take a detour and find themselves on a back road in the middle of nowhere. They are kidnapped by armed, masked men and imprisoned in a country house.
As time slowly passes, they realise that they are not political hostages and that something far more sinister is at work. They resolve to escape the compound and the malevolent doctor keeping them there…
Let’s start by saying that Caged is not a bad film. There are many others like it that have attempted similar, and pulled it off to greater effect, but that is not say what we have here is by any means dreadful. The trouble with Caged is that everything feels so average that whenever there is the slightest threat that something interesting will happen, it leads to a worse disappointment than if it were an out-and-out terrible shocker.
The opening introduction to the past of our heroine, Carole, is promising enough. A creepy scarecrow, a dead child, and a dog attack reminiscent of Cujo all make for a solid start before we leap into the future and meet the adult Carole delivering a baby in what the subtitle unhelpfully tells us is the former Yugoslavia. The absence of any specific reference to the country in which the film is set appears to only tell us that the whole region is a bad place to be, and offers no real political or social context. It’s a shame, and deeply troubling, to think that the serious themes being dealt with in the film are simply thrown into an area that western European cinema has labelled ‘dangerous’, instead of being intelligently explored with an aim to understanding the region and the suffering of those who live there. It suggests no real attention to the setting on the part of the filmmakers and one wonders why they even bothered telling us where the action takes place at all.
The kidnap scene itself is a taut and tense affair, with a good use of sound, as we follow the sleepy Carole as she listens to her iPod, drowning out all sound around us, leaving us only able to see the horror on the faces of her travel companions, Samir and Mathias, as they face the armed kidnappers. The sounds of shouts, breaking glass and screaming are thrown at us to great effect after the pleasant musical interlude, and the relative quiet of the van they are bundled into is a creepy end to the scene, as they are carted off to the prison in which they will await their fate.
In the makeshift prison, which looks like it’s been designed with films like Hostel, Frontier(s) and Martyrs very much in mind, the characters are put through the uncertainty of why they are there, the claustrophobic atmosphere and the general horror of their situation. Again, these moments are done to reasonably good effect, and we are still uncertain as to why they have been taken right up to the point that one of them is taken away to a room at the end of the corridor. The return of the guards with bloodstained cool-boxes, immediately followed by the sight of the prisoner being wheeled out on a trolley with a gaping wound where his torso should be gives us the clues we needed, and brings with it the helplessness of their predicament: no ransom will save them.
Unfortunately, the film offers nothing more in the way of tension, atmosphere or horror from this point on. There is far too much attention paid to the imprisonment itself, and the time spent inside their cages, but not enough in the way of actual substance for the audience to react to. We are never made to share the tight space they occupy, or feel the dread of waiting to be dragged away to face an admittedly rather creepy doctor. A dream sequence that links Carole’s current situation with her past encounter with a dog that killed her friend could have provided a welcome sense of horror but instead falls flat with an obvious and clichéd attempt at shock. As a result, the caged element of the film feels forced when it should provide the backbone of the horror.
Overall performances never stray too far from average throughout, and the characters themselves are a little thin. Apart from Carole’s traumatic past, we are given nothing more in the way of development (except maybe the fact she can arm wrestle). The doctor and his guards are given nothing that could make them stand apart from any other horror film antagonists, and the fact they are from an unnamed former-Yugoslav country makes their motivations outside of profit thin on the ground, unless the intention is to portray the whole region in a less than flattering light.
By the time the film reaches its stalk and chase climax, it’s difficult to care about the outcome, and any attempts to get the audience to take the themes at work seriously are undermined by the contrivances and clichés found in a hundred similar films. The fear Carole has of dogs due to her childhood trauma seems to be there only to add another level of suspense to the escape scenes, and it fails thanks to a lack of any real thought (she’s afraid of dogs, must get past some dogs, gets past some dogs, she’s no longer afraid of dogs). It all feels a little bit superficial, and it manages to do nothing more than boost the running time.
It’s not a total disaster, but Caged is definitely a disappointment. There are moments of promise, but it feels as though the film has been built up around these moments rather than them being a product of a great idea. The result is a film that fails to deliver enough thrills and shocks, and plods rather than flows. It is not the worst horror film you’ll ever see, but it is all so average that you can’t help but wonder if they paid any real attention to the films they were trying to emulate. RM
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