Healing Water

I didn't pay attention to the genre until looking at the review site just now, and to be honest I didn't pick up that the story had taken place over 10 years, probably because if either of those girls were taken 10 years ago Sean was playing a paedophile yet again. Good performances and the pacing/editing was fantastic. Shot really nicely too. The ending, dont think I liked it tbh. Ive seen too many documentaries about this sort of thing to find the ending believable. All the interior scenes with the girls were great.

Performances were the heart of this film. The passage of time is were this film suffers. Sure its punctuated by news articles informing us, but seeing no noticeable change in the leads appearances was a little disappointing.

I agree with spurdburt - there was no passage of time visible in the performances: the behaviour of the leads would be quite different after a decade together, and you didn't really get a sense of the closeness that would have formed between them over that time. Plus, I think its a tough out for this film in this heat; its hard for a serious film when all the other films are tackling their genre with tongue firmly in cheek. Performances and concept were really good, and the film itself was well put together (and shot beautifully) but it definitely needed more emphasis on showing that passage of time.

I'm sure I've said it many times in reviews before, making a serious 48 Hours film is hard. This team tried but I just don't think it panned out. The film started off well, with a dramatic abduction, but then it just lost its momentum. The script was kinda trite and the actors I think had a hard time trying to deliver some of the overly melodramatic dialogue. The ending was really confusing too. The location didn't sell as a place two people had been locked up in for 10 years and once you saw the outside you couldn't believe they hadn't escaped sooner. A rookie mistake of trying to tell a story that the production couldn't accommodate. Speaking of the 10 year thing, that really didn't sell. The girls didn't appear to age and the reveal of the captor in the wheel chair at the end only confused me. If that was to make it look like he'd become enfeebled with age, then it didn't sell. Particularly for the relatively brief time he appears on screen.