Macabre…ish Horror Review: Chained

 

 

Chained, 2012/ 1 hr 34 min.

 

By pure horrible luck, a child (Evan Bird) and his mother (Julia Ormond) flag down the wrong taxi and he drives them to the middle of nowhere. With child locks on the doors, they can’t get out, it’s a rural area so there’s no signal. They are trapped and he pulls into a garage. And that child listens while his mom is brutalized.

 

The boy, he gets a different outcome, a life of servitude to a monster, his name is Bob (Vincent D’Onofrio). Mostly normal house chores plus cleaning up after his ‘conquests’ but also clipping and saving their missing persons notices and I.Ds in a scrapbook. The child is also renamed Rabbit. All punishment, from stealing to making him nervous is a beating.

 

After an unsuccessful escape, the boy is chained inside the house and all of the horrors of their life, it all just becomes normal. Then years later, one evening Bob picks up a fare and it’s an abusive man and his son, it causes flashbacks, it impacts him and suddenly he wants Rabbit to be educated. Sort of…

 

Bob wants to teach Rabbit (Eamon Farren) to be like him and hate and hurt people, like he does. Rabbit learns but he won’t hurt or hate them, they are not the same. But Rabbit’s resistance is infuriating to Bob.

 

Later, after Rabbit gets his own chair and bedroom, they go on an unsuccessful ‘hunt’ together and it all comes to a head. Bob has to clean up unexpected loose ends but it doesn’t go as planned. And Rabbit finds out a truly shocking, terrible truth and confronts it! And because of it, really, after everything that’s happened, very little changes. That moment, if anything, determines and solidifies his fate.

 

This movie is bleak. It’s sad, you may feel awful after it’s over. But it is good, very well done and though the cast is small, it’s perfect. The pacing and story is good but I probably will not watch this again. Very well done!

 

 

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