Chained (2012)

Jennifer Lynch's Chained arrives with a title that doubles as a thesis and a premise that doubles as a dare. A serial killer named Bob, played with unsettling commitment by Vincent D'Onofrio, abducts a boy, renames him Rabbit, and spends nine years trying to raise him into an accomplice. The film is grim, patient, and shot in fifteen days in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. It is not a pleasant evening at the cinema.

For classificatory purposes, this one sits nearly still. The cast is uniformly white, and the story offers no racial or economic commentary, no climate concerns, no queer subtext, no interest in bodies as sites of celebration, and no framing of neurodivergence. Bob's cruelty is traced to childhood abuse, which makes it a backstory and not a diagnosis. The single flicker of cultural sensibility comes from the director's chair. Lynch, a woman working inside a lurid male tradition, frames the violence against women as the genre's own sickness, and some critics read the result as a female dissection of misogyny. We can credit that reading without endorsing it. The camera lingers on violated bodies long enough that the critique and the spectacle become difficult to separate, which is precisely the trouble.

Then there is the question of intent. Lynch said she hoped to promote a dialogue about child abuse and to explore nature versus nurture. That is a mission statement, not a homily. The film never pauses to explain itself, never turns to the audience to deliver a lesson, and for that small mercy we should be grateful. It is a nasty piece of work that argues through atmosphere and dread. We have sat through many films that lecture. This one merely loiters in a garage with a man who should not be trusted.