Chained - Difficult to watch, but worth it

‘Chained’ is never going to be what’s described as ‘mainstream cinema’ – it’s just too damn dark.  To sum it up, a prolific serial killer kills a young mum and captures her young son, keeping him chained up inside his house for what could be the rest of his life.  Therefore, you have two principal characters – the killer and the victim.  It’s a simple premise and could go either way.  Luckily, both characters play their respective parts well and you really don’t know what’s going to happen.

The killer is suitably nasty, giving you one hell of a bad guy to want to see get what’s coming to him.  And the boy – who becomes a teenager in his prison-home – is definitely someone we would all root for.  He’s clearly disturbed from his captivity and therefore not some sort of a$$-kicking hero who can just break out through use of force alone.  But it’s not just the actors who shine, you have Jennifer (daughter of David) Lynch behind the camera.  She turns what could just be simply waiting for the good guy to escape the bad guy into some more.  If the story was less dark and more mainstream, we would all be able to sit back and wait for the inevitable happy ending we’re used to seeing.  However, here we know that anything can happen and we’re never sure whether our hero is going to come out on top, or ever turn out to be the hero we desperately want him to.

Chained won’t be for everyone.  You need a strong stomach as it gets pretty nasty quite often, but if captivity-horror is what you’re into then this will certainly be something you’ll want to watch.  If you know David Lynch’s work you may expect varying levels of Lynchy-weirdness to run in the family, but you won’t find it here.  There are no alternate dimensions to escape into.  You won’t even make it out the window if you try and escape this one!

7/10 if I woke up on Groundhog Day and had to watch this again, I could live with that