Undone by one twist too many, Jennifer Lynch’s Chained nonetheless covers some transgressive and interesting terrain, telling the story of a boy imprisoned for a decade by a madman, and made to participate in his crimes (think Dexter by of Nell… sort of). In its chilliest, most unnerving moments, the film asks viewers to consider the nature/nurture breakdown of sociopathy, and how monsters are remade generation after generation.
The story centers on a nine-year-old, Tim (Evan Bird), who, while coming home from the movies with his mother (Julia Ormand), is kidnapped by a psychopathic cab driver and serial killer, Bob (a beefy Vincent D’Onofrio). After murdering his mother, Bob begins to shape Tim into his unwilling pupil, rechristening him Rabbit following a couple abortive escape attempts. He chains him to a bed in his secluded home, and breaks him down mentally. Years later, with Bob having groomed him for homicidal culling, the understandably wrought Tim/Rabbit (Eamon Farren) stands poised on the precipice of his own plunge into further darkness.
With Surveillance, Lynch crafted a work of spare desperation, where unchained menace seemed to blow in the wind. In Chained, she roots herself much more to character, and digs down deeper into warped psychological motivational systems, to satisfying effect. While no stranger to unsettling imagery and tonal manipulation (she’s the daughter of director David Lynch), Lynch here somewhat surprisingly takes a fairly straightforward tack with the story; this is delivered as a sordid father-son tale, which makes the grim violence mean something. The performances are great, too. D’Onofrio is dialed in and scary as Bob, but also realistically trigged; Farren, meanwhile, captures the shattered innocence and flickering malevolent potential of Rabbit.
The film’s great disappointment, then, is when — after some moments of truth that find Rabbit getting his first taste of blood, and then experiencing a night of freedom hunting for more victims with Bob — Chained pivots and attempts to grab surprise via a somewhat bizarre yet almost conventional “twist.” Lynch takes sole screenplay credit, though her script is actually based on another, previous script (more on that below). It’s not entirely clear where this idea came from from, but it doesn’t work — either on an emotional/cathartic level or as a very convincing ancillary argument about the disease and rot of generational violence.
Housed in a Blu-ray case, the movie’s Blu-ray/DVD combo pack release includes a 1080p 2.40:1 widescreen transfer, with a Dolby TrueHD 7.1 audio track on the former format, which also houses the bonus features. Under a motion menu screen with a dozen chapter-stop options, Chained features the movie’s trailer, a one-and-a-half-minute alternate murder sequence which allegedly garnered the film a NC-17 in its initial editorial pass with the MPAA, and the big other extra, an audio commentary track with Lynch and D’Onofrio.
While there are an awful lot of gaps in this conversation, D’Onofrio helps steer Lynch toward engagement, talking about the 15-day shoot, (for D’Onofrio, concurrent with his work on Fire with Fire, a straight-to-video flick with Bruce Willis and Rosario Dawson), his method acting and interest in playing a killer that didn’t function merely as a plot device in part of a bigger story. He also flashes some deadpan humor, joking when he appears on screen in boxers and a grungy T-shirt that, “One of the reasons I did this movie was so I could keep the wardrobe.” Apart from talking some about child abuse, Lynch chats less about the thematic broad strokes of the material than one might expect; she does, however, mention the only other person she says she thought of for the role of Bob (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and sketches out the more “torture-porn-oriented” script, by Damian O’Donnell, that producers Lee Nelson and David Buelow, originally brought to her, seeking her opinion and input. All in all, it’s a slightly above average commentary track, though when Lynch talks about wanting a director’s cut you wish she went into a bit more detail about exactly what sort of additions/changes she’d most want to make. To purchase the Blu-ray/DVD combo pack via Amazon, click here. C+ (Movie) C+ (Disc)