FILM GUTTER REVIEWS: ​CAGE (2016)

DIR. WARREN DUDLEY, 80 MINS

There’s always a little reticence on my part to approach this sort of film. Not because there’s something specifically disturbing about the ‘kidnapped person trapped in cage’ trope that permeates through horror, but it’s so tried and true that it’s hard to do with that much originality. It can work well – I can think of a handful of interesting entries, with Oldboy being an obvious standout. The trope itself can even work if done well, with strong performances.

Cage gives itself away with the title, and you’re pretty set from the get-go with what you’re getting into. Our main (and basically only character) is Gracie Blake, and the difficulties of her life are laid out as a series or phone calls that play throughout the credits. Not enough money to go around, her child living elsewhere (although it’s never really specified what that situation is) and a life she hates in taking phone calls for a sex line. In a desperate moment, she accepts an offer of $5000 to meet one of her regular callers – a terrible idea of course, as she wakes up in a near-empty room chained to and locked within a cage.

It’s effectively a one-woman performance, as while there are some conversations and interactions they’re all on the phone. Lucy-Jane Quinlan carries it pretty well, but it’s so hard to deliver something like this without it falling down in a place or two. Her kidnapper, Peter, is some sort of businessman who jets all over the country, who leaves her phone in her possession (??) so she can contact her boyfriend, her mother and ultimately of course the police – despite instructions not to do so. Peter leaves her enough food and drink to live on, along with toilet roll and a bucket, implying to Gracie that there’s some reason that she’s there that he will reveal in time.

To be fair there are plenty of twists and turns, enough to keep you guessing, although I would have to say that not all of them absolutely land – in fact one or two events are sadly a bit frustrating and rather jarred my suspension of disbelief. With these films that sense of reality is pivotal, and Cage breaks it more than is comfortable. Some of the side actors – despite only being on the phone – are not always believable, and there are also a number of other smaller niggles that I won’t detail here for risk of spoiling it. In my mind some of those less significant elements added up to a rather bigger problem – there was a sense of convenience to the plot, things happening in a certain way at a certain time that were a little too coincidental.

As I said up front, the ‘person (mostly women, to be honest) kidnapped and held against their will’ isn’t my favourite subgenre, but I always try and go into a movie with an open mind. This is not the best example of the field, despite some promising ideas – unfortunately all too often it fails to deliver on the concepts it has, and a likeable lead performance is slightly undermined by the plot and sometimes the script. You might want to visit this one if you consider yourself an afficionado of this particular field, but it didn’t hold my attention captive as it might have.

RATING: 4/10. I think with the sorts of subgenres you either have to do it really well, or deliver something different and original – and sadly Cage doesn’t really deliver on either of those fronts. I tip my hat to Lucy-Jane Quinlan, who basically spend all the screen time on her own, in a good effort to carry this particular vehicle. But it loses its way in a few places and there are some questionable decisions in the plot sense, so I have to come in with a slightly below-average grade.

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