Cert 18, 84mins

The tenuous black irony of the week is that Roland Joffé, the director of Captivity, was once married to Jane Lapotaire, who arguably delivered the greatest Piaf performance in Pam Gems’s stage play in the Seventies. If Captivity is the best script Joffé can snag, his career is in dire straits. He has struggled to direct a significant hit since The Killing Fields (1984) and The Mission (1986). This feeble attempt to swing with the latest horror-flick fashion for gratuitous sensation is embarrassing.

The plot of Captivity is as skinny as the pleasure. A blonde and beautiful advertising model, played with award-winning desperation by Elisha Cuthbert, is kidnapped by a couple of wealthy psychotic brothers and tortured ad nauseum. The reason? Who knows, and frankly, no one cares.

Scenes from the brothers’ collection of snuff tapes fill in any down-time. There are girls strapped to dentist’s chairs dissolving in acid showers, and before the opening credits have rolled, a sledge-hammer is buried in a the uncomplaining head of an extra. The way horror films are evolving there’s plenty more work where that comes from.

Background

• Captivity

• Captivity - Sunday Times review

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Ultraviolent sadism is now in Hollywood's bloodstream. Christopher Goodwin reports on a horrifying trend

Related Internet Links

• 2007 London Film Festival coverage

• Times Online Film Trailers

What’s disturbing about Joffé’s new lease of creative life is the impeccable production values of this disgusting and mindless nonsense. Torture seems to be the new, acceptable face of mulitiplex pornography. Sexual violence is heavily circumscribed by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), but where torture between unconsenting adults is concerned there seem to be absolutely no limits. I’m not against films that contextualise graphic scenes of rape and torture, but there’s something seedy about cinema where violation is the sole “pleasurable” point. One wonders how much more depraved screen violence has to get before someone at the BBFC has the courage to pull the plug.

The ludicrous extremity of Captivity inadvertently caps its own potential to shock. The shapely Cuthbert is imprisoned in a cement basement with metal cabinets that suddenly pop open with fetish gear her captors want her to wear. When she refuses to put these garments on, she is strapped to a chair. A siphon is forced into her mouth and the gruesome contents of a fridge are Magimixed and poured down her throat. In no particular order these include eyeballs, maggots, testicles, ears and innards. You’ll be delighted to know she has a cast-iron stomach.

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