The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
This refers to thrillers where someone is held prisoner by a captor. The drama of the story centers around their attempts to escape from confinement, where suspense rides a rollercoaster around the building up of hopes and seeing them dashed.
There have been a number of films about people imprisoned by psychos, serial killers and backwoods hicks. A popular variant came during the Torture Porn fad where people were imprisoned in locked rooms and forced to participate in cruel and sadistic games.
Of more recent has been the Conceptual Containment Thriller, which seeks to confine a person or persons in as small a place as possible – a coffin, an elevator, a tree, a tent, a phone booth – for the duration of the show.
The topic is discussed in more depth in the essay Imprisonment Thrillers
A film about a snuff site that broadcasts a torture gameshow live on the web. This is a thriller that feels as though made by people who know nothing about the internet or law enforcement procedure
Steven Spielberg’s daughter Destry makes her directorial debut with a confused mix of an imprisonment thriller and a zombie film, albeit a zombie film that only produces a single zombie
Seventh of the V/H/S Found Footage horror anthologies, this is one of the best with a number of the episodes venturing into SF and others that feature some genuinely outlandish moments
A thriller that comes with an identical premise to the earlier Trunk about a girl who is abducted and locked inside the trunk of a car from where she tries to affect an escape from her abductor
Standout film with a very creepy Hugh Grant making two Mormon missionary girls a prisoner in his home. The script for this is so playful and audaciously challenging in its ideas that it blows you away.
The Platform offered a striking allegory with a prison where a banquet table of food moved down 300 levels each day. This is a sequel
From the people behind Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, this is the horror version of Peter Pan. And good grief, does this go dark with Peter as a child abductor and Tinkerbell who shoots up ‘fairy dust’ through a needle
At variance to the assorted other films about survival in shark-infested waters, this features Jai Courtney in a completely crazed performance as a serial killer who feeds his victims to sharks
Yorgos Lanthimos has become a director of acclaim in recent years. Here he remakes the Korean film Save the Green Planet where crazy conspiracy theorist Jesse Plemons abducts CEO Emma Stone insisting she is an alien
A thriller in which Bill Skarsgård is a petty thief who break into a SUV only to become trapped inside and psychologically tormented by the vehicle’s owner Anthony Hopkins
An airport psycho-thriller that feels like wannabe Gillian Flynn that has been mounted as a vehicle for the talent-handicapped Sydney Sweeney. The whole plot hangs on a believability stretching mid-film twist revelation
A True Crime film loosely based on an incident in Russia in the 1990s where a man and his mother killed homeless people and ate their flesh. This pushes the material into an admirably grim and disturbing place
A real head-scratcher where all of humanity suddenly find that they are trapped inside their houses and cannot get out. While outside there lurk sea monsters!
Irish director Damian McCarthy impressed a good deal with Oddity. In his equally spooky follow-up, writer Adam Scott travels to a hotel in Ireland only to become trapped in a haunted suite