6/10
Lack of storytelling
13 October 2015
There are some interesting ideas in this movie sadly they were not implemented...

"Stockholm, Pennsylvania" a young woman kidnapped at 4 and kept in a basement for 18 years is reunited with the parents she doesn't remember,the child-kidnapping genre usually it focuses on the victim and the abductor and ends when the subject is found.This film had a more original spin and focused on the after math.I give the film points for originality, one usually does not see this part we only see the victim's arms wrapped around their parents and the credits start to roll. Leia is deeply attached to the mild-mannered end-of-days cultist (Jason Isaacs, in a very small role) who kidnapped her and cut her off from the outside world. But that enforced seclusion also means that at 22 she's facing the childhood challenges and embarrassments of learning how to operate in the adult world.all this sounds like a filmmaker's dream protect.

Sadly it takes a turn we put ourselves in the shoes of the mother although her intentions are good, she becomes extremely obsessive to get her daughter back to the point that her actions are not so different from the kidnapper,that's when the film loses me,it becomes unrealistic, it is an obsession to achieve her daughters love at all costs.

Strong performances from Saoirse Ronan and Cynthia Nixon, they manage to get the high points of the movie,I leaned more to Emma Donaghue's compelling 2010 novel Room, which developed far more bracing and psychologically nuanced drama out of a similar scenario of shut-ins readjusting to an unknown world.
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