Chained (2012 film)

Plot

After leaving a movie theater, Sarah Fittler and her nine-year-old son are kidnapped by their taxi driver, Bob. Bob grew up with an abusive father who forced him to have sex with his own mother, which turned him into a serial killer who rapes and murders young women. He kills Sarah and keeps her son captive, calling him Rabbit. When Rabbit tries to flee, Bob chains him to a wall.

Nine years later, Rabbit is a teenager still trapped in Bob’s house. He does chores, buries the bodies of Bob’s victims, and makes scrapbooks of newspaper clippings about them at Bob’s demand. Bob unchains Rabbit and tries to act like a father, hoping to turn Rabbit into a killer like himself. To push him, Bob makes Rabbit pick a victim from a yearbook.

Rabbit chooses a girl named Angie, and Bob abducts her. Bob tells Rabbit he will kill Angie unless Rabbit does it first. When Bob bursts in, Rabbit stabs Angie in the stomach and drags her to the corpse room. Pleased, Bob agrees to find another target.

While driving, Bob spots the word “help” Rabbit wrote on the cab and realizes Rabbit used his anatomy lessons to stab Angie in a non-fatal spot. Bob knocks Rabbit out and goes to the room where Angie is hiding. Angie slashes Bob’s Achilles tendon, Rabbit wakes up, and together they kill Bob. Rabbit buries Bob beside his victims.

Production

The film was shot in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, over 15 days. Lynch used the same crew as Surveillance. The original concept came from a script by Damian O'Donnell; Lynch initially felt it was wrong for her because she did not want to make torture porn, but rewrote it to focus on characters rather than gratuitous violence. Lynch said she aimed to "humanise and explain – though not justify – the devastating behaviour that is a serial killer."

D'Onofrio was drawn to the project by Lynch's involvement, as he had wanted to work with her on Boxing Helena. Lynch's first choice for the role, she praised D'Onofrio's performance as brave because the part required an actor capable of showing an injured inner child. Farren and D'Onofrio worked well together, with little improvisation. D'Onofrio said he needed to find Bob's moral compass.

Farren was impressed with Lynch's cover letter and collaborated easily with her on set. Lynch recruited Evan Bird, who played young Rabbit, over Skype after his audition tape gave her chills. Lynch described the film as a study of how monsters are made, wanting to "promote a dialogue about child abuse." Through Bob's backstory, she attempted to show how society turned him into a monster.

With Rabbit, she explored "nature vs nurture." Farren described Rabbit as a stunted child who stopped emotionally maturing at nine. Rabbit did not become a full replica of Bob because he had a loving childhood, allowing Lynch to compare the two men.

Release

Chained first screened at Montreal's Fantasia Festival on August 5, 2012. Anchor Bay Entertainment put it out direct-to-video in the US on DVD and Blu-ray that October 2. The MPAA initially gave it an NC-17 for "some explicit violence." Lynch challenged that decision but lost, then trimmed the film to get an R rating.

A more brutal version of Mary's death, cut for the R, appears as a bonus feature. Lynch wanted to call the film Rabbit, but the studio refused. Money set aside for a director's cut went elsewhere, though Lynch still hopes to make one eventually.

Reception

Critics were sharply divided on Chained. Dennis Harvey of Variety panned it as “a repugnant exercise in physical and psychological sadism” and “a redundant wallow in arted-up, torture-porn cruelty,” drawing a negative comparison to Jennifer Lynch’s earlier film Boxing Helena on grounds of misogyny. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave it one star out of five, calling it a “fantastically crass and fatuous serial-killer movie,” while Tim Robey of The Daily Telegraph also awarded one star, labeling it “a lurid disgrace.” David Hughes of Empire gave it two stars, noting it was “plenty nasty but singularly lacking in clever new twists on a weary genre.” Jamie S. Rich of DVD Talk rated it one and a half stars, finding Vincent D’Onofrio’s performance “kind of comical” and the ending “increasingly ridiculous,” though he praised the sequence between Rabbit and Angie and Conor Leslie’s performance.

On the positive side, Matt Glasby of Total Film gave it three stars, calling it a “tense serial killer thriller” with the ending as his only major complaint. Rod Lott of the Oklahoma Gazette commended the first half as “absorbing and tense,” and while he found the second half less compelling, he noted that Lynch “does not compromise in her direction, nor shy away from depicting depravity” throughout. Scott A. Gray of Exclaim! described it as a “deeply disturbing, but deeply human look at the causation of cyclical violence.”

Simon Foster of the Special Broadcasting Service awarded three and a half stars, calling it a “bleak, claustrophobic and brutal serial killer drama.” Scott Weinberg of Fearnet called it “a stark, unpredictable, and frequently ugly rumination on themes like free will and morality,” adding that it “deserves credit for trying to mine some relatively intelligent chills out of something different, topical, and primally disturbing.” Lauren Taylor of Bloody Disgusting gave it four stars, writing that it “takes a typical tale of an abused child growing up to become a serial killer and makes it something that is Oscar worthy,” with praise for D’Onofrio’s performance.

Serena Whitney of Dread Central rated it three and a half stars, stating that “not since American Psycho have audiences experienced a clever dissection of the appalling misogyny displayed in the serial killer subgenre from a female perspective.”