"Held" boasts an interesting idea for contrived thriller

 

Held (2021)

Couples therapy brought to you by Jigsaw commingles with the #MeToo movement in “Held,” a single-location thriller that only looks like a routine home-invasion exercise. Instead, it wants to be a film for this cultural moment and comment on the female experience of being subjugated. The fact that writer Jill Awbrey (who also stars) uses her perspective within a voyeuristic horror-movie infrastructure to talk about gender roles and patriarchal ideals for her first feature script is ambitious for sure. Helming Awbrey’s script is filmmaking team Chris Lofing and Travis Cluff, who cut their teeth in the found-footage horror arena with 2015’s “The Gallows,” but they only slightly better their debut with this sophomore effort in terms of thematic content and an angry point-of-view. For as conceptually interesting as it is, "Held" bites off more than it can chew with its boldly imagined angle and suffers somewhat from a feeble lead performance.

On her way to her weekend Airbnb in the country, poet Emma Barrett (Awbrey) has a strange but ultimately harmless encounter with her rideshare driver Joe (Rez Kempton). Joe, of course, becomes a red herring when he asks Emma if she will alone, keeps commenting on how out of the way the house is, and then not-so-subtly asks for an extra tip. Once Emma is in safely, she settles into the modernist home, complete with a smart security system made for a fortress, and unwinds with a swim and some wine. Emma’s husband Henry (Bart Johnson) then arrives a day early. They intend to celebrate their wedding anniversary, but it seems this couple has hit a rough patch. As they pass out in bed, it seems Emma and Henry have been drugged by a masked man, who also redresses them and plants electrodes behind their ears. By morning, the Barretts learn their every move is being monitored by a modulated voice. Both must submit and go along willingly with their puppet master’s demands—like Henry chivalrously opening the door for his wife, and Emma smiling and be grateful—or else they will receive electric shocks like bad dogs. Are they caught in another stealth “Saw” reboot not starring Chris Rock, or is this a horror-tinged remake of “The Parent Trap”? Or is there a different kind of insidious evil at the root of this marriage?

As an allegory, "Held" works. How the film opens—the beginning of a sexual assault with a younger Emma in the backseat of a car—seems unrelated to the proceedings at first. Both moments in Emma’s life, though, do deal with being trapped in one space, as the opening ones capture the claustrophobia felt as the car windows are rolled up. Emma in the backseat of a car and then in an Uber are not just throwaway details because guess who will be in the driver’s seat by the end? Jill Awbrey makes her acting feature debut here, and it kind of shows in her flat performance as Emma that doesn’t quite hold the gravitas needed to play a brittle rape survivor gaining control. As a real-world thriller, it can be solidly tense and certainly puts its central couple through the wringer, while working towards taking some big swings. Revelations of infidelity keep allegiances shifting, but when Emma stumbles upon a key video that explains everything she needs to know, the film has overtly revealed itself to be the “Get Out” for sexism. Unfortunately, the plot is so contrived, only working if the characters behave as their captor intends, and then ends in a satisfying enough climax that throws in an overblown, unintentionally funny melee through a glass wall. “Held” is not unengaging, but it could have been smarter.

Grade: C +

Magnet Releasing is releasing “Held” (93 min.) in select theaters and on demand on April 9, 2021.