CHAINED

A woman and her son leave the cinema and take a taxi to take them home, but the driver instead kidnaps the two and takes them to his home outside the city. The man kills the woman and chains the child with the intention of raising him as his heir and successor in the profession of a killer. Time passes, the boy grows up, and his guardian/jailer continues the activity of murdering, abducting, and killing young women until one day the man decides it is time for the boy to commit his first murder. "Chained", or when torture porn has authorial aspirations. A genre born from openly commercial products – not to mention serials – like "Saw" and "Hostel" fits uneasily into the realm of "high" cinema. In a sense, only Laugier with his "Martyrs" has managed to give a distinctly authorial stamp to a story of torture and suffering with splatter and ultraviolence turns, otherwise calm waters. And "Chained" doesn't rescue the fortunes of this thesis either, the thriller with strong dramatic connotations that Jennifer Lynch crafts following her professional rebirth. As suggested by her last name, Jennifer Lynch is the daughter of the renowned David, creator of masterpieces like "The Elephant Man" and "Blue Velvet", a daughter of art who at just 23 years old, under her father's producing wing, directed her first film, the cult "Boxing Helena", a critically panned debut that cost the director over ten years of inactivity. Upon her return to Lynch, things go poorly and the horror produced by Bollywood "Hisss" is taken away from her, re-edited, re-scored, and re-soundtracked, becoming practically something else compared to the director's intentions. Things go much better with the thriller "Surveillance", and subsequently this thriller/drama/horror "Chained", here and there considered the best work to date by Lynch. But "Chained" is a classic misfire, a film that promises and then doesn't deliver, an ultra-indie flick that fails to seize the expressive freedom that these products could and should have to align with a notion of fake truculence more suited to festival audiences than cinema-goers. "Chained" has a rather banal underlying idea, but not one devoid of interesting points, which often have given rise to fascinating and disturbing works, namely documenting in a realistic and explicit manner the life of a serial killer. The past has offered a plethora of mediocre and terrible films on the subject (various "Ted Bundy", "Ed Gein", "Dahmer" and the like), but also gems like "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer". "Chained" certainly doesn't sink into the filth like those directed by Lommel and Feifer, though a film like "Henry" is light-years away, primarily falling into the deadly trap of the film that wants to "give itself a tone" without having the means to do so. It is immediately apparent that Lynch wanted to make an introspective film capable of probing the tormented mind of a societal outcast, with the commendable variant of seeking a point of view in the product of this social anomaly. The protagonist of the story is indeed this boy reduced to a prisoner, but at the same time continuously subjected to a learning process that should transform him into a monster like the one who holds him captive. The boy has no name, is immediately humiliated and depersonalized by his jailer and called Rabbit. The boy's gaze is for most of the film devoid of judgment, as if inured to horror and violence, although the director reminds us at every moment how unpleasant and disgusting the killer is, played very well by a Vincent D'Onofrio who is increasingly colossal. This is the core of the film, its soul, not very original but alignable on a path that could surprise. Instead, the film is anesthetized from beginning to end, boring and repetitive in a back-and-forth of victims brought into the house, killed almost always off-screen, and buried in the basement. There is a lack of real interest in the narrative sequence and only a monotony that pervades the story, the actions, and the scenery. Occasionally, there is an even more banal attempt to justify the killer's actions with flashbacks that show us the difficult childhood of the man, overwhelmed by a violent father, in one single occasion Lynch grants us a splash of splatter with a slit throat, then, when there should be a bit of spice in the finale, a character enters the scene – the girl that Rabbit should kill – who behaves in such an unrealistic way as to leave one stunned. Even the final twist is so absurd and far from any logic in its staging as to irritate rather than surprise. Of this pseudo-torture porn, written with the left hand by Lynch herself and completely devoid of the desire to take risks, only the good performance of the actors and a beautiful cinematography that uses warm colors in a functional way remain. Try again Jennifer and don't get mad if they compare you to your father.