Locked In
Story: When an actress, Katherine (Famke Janssen) ends up as a coma patient in a hospital, her nurse, Nicky Mackenzie (Anna Friel) begins to take a deep interest in how she got there. And uncovers a trail of betrayal, infidelity, manipulation and murder.
Review: Locked In begins with a team of doctors attending to a celebrity patient, trying to revive her. The only part of her body that may have any movement is her left eye. Through patches of flashbacks, we know that Katherine adopted her best friend's teenage daughter, Lina. With the actress returning to her celebrity commitments after her husband's death, Lina took Jamie, Katherine's little stepson who suffers from epileptic fits, under her wing,
In the first plot twist (brace yourself, for there will be many), Jamie's father leaves their sprawling mansion, Rowling Manor, to his son in the will. When Lina (Rose Williams) and Jamie (Finn Cole) grow up, they decide to get married, with the former never having really gone back to the outside world and the latter completely dependent on her. Their only connection with the outside world is Dr.Lawrence (Alex Hassel), who is the family GP and looks after Jamie. Katherine, however, is extremely resentful of Lina since she feels betrayed in light of being usurped from her position as the lady of the house. Jamie, seemingly, hooked on the painkillers he has been prescribed, starts sinking further and further into his illness. And he too, grows impatient and resentful of Lina. Her only source of comfort now is Dr.Lawrence and soon, there is something strong brewing between them.
While director Nour Wazzi and her set of actors, Famke Janssen (‘X-Men’), Rose Williams (‘The Power’), Finn Cole (‘Peaky Blinders’), Alex Hassel (‘The Tragedy of Macbeth’) and Anna Friel (‘Marcella’), come bearing solid stock of credible work before, Locked In doesn't manage to get it all together as a psychological thriller.
There are plot twists, within plot twists, within plot twists. Yes, you read that correctly. The character arcs shift gears too often and drastically. The screenplay is over plotted and yet somehow its 90-minute run-time seems too long a watch. The pace is undeniably slow. Although Locked In packs in every thriller trope, it all seems too staged and set up - the eerie background score, the sprawling mansion in the English countryside, the steamy scenes and even the gory ones. It doesn't help that one can whiff the plotlines from a distance, except perhaps the last one, but that too is a sudden tonal shift that doesn't add up. The constant going back and forth in time adds to the uneven narrative.
All in all, you wouldn't want to be 'locked in' with this movie, but if you are, you could amuse yourself with some of the unintentionally funny moments.
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