Gone (2012)

There is a particular kind of February thriller that arrives, does its business, and departs without leaving fingerprints, and Heitor Dhalia's Gone is a pristine specimen of the form. Amanda Seyfried plays Jill Conway, a year removed from a kidnapping that the Portland police declined to take seriously on account of her having once been institutionalized. When her sister Molly disappears, the authorities resume their skepticism, and Jill sets out to solve the case herself. The film holds a twelve percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which feels generous in the way that a shrug feels generous. It is competent, anonymous, and gone.

The cultural inventory here is modest and largely incidental. Jill is a woman whom men in authority refuse to believe, and she responds by arming herself and doing the work, which registers as a faint empowerment beat and nothing more. Detective Hood, played by Daniel Sunjata, is a Black man who exists in the story without anyone remarking upon it, which is the correct and unremarkable state of affairs. Kate Moennig appears in the cast, though the film offers no romantic or identity content of any kind. Jill's history of psychiatric treatment is deployed strictly as a mechanism to explain why nobody trusts her, a plot lever rather than a statement about stigma. There is no wealth to redistribute, no climate to mourn, no bodies to celebrate, no history to revise.

What remains is a survival narrative with a low pulse, and the film never stops to address the audience about its meaning. A theme about believing women hums somewhere beneath the surface, faint enough that a viewer could miss it while checking the time. The direction is aggressively anonymous, the script a layer cake of conveniences, and the whole enterprise evaporates with the last credit. We classify it, we note its small sympathetic gestures, and we move on to the next screening.