"Finish all the mazes and you can go home."

Rating: 9/10 (28 November 2017)

I didn't realize until I came to some of the reviews for this movie that it was two and a half hours long. It didn't seem like that while watching as one gets so engrossed in the story that time manages to fly by pretty quickly.
I thought the plotting for the film was nearly flawless. The one thing I found exception to was when Detective Loki (Jake Gylenhaal) got distracted by the phone call from the department store clerk, he left Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) in the abandoned house and never bothered to return in a timely fashion. He had pretty good instincts about something going on there, so a quicker follow up would have been expected.
Otherwise, I thought the screenplay and director Denis Villeneuve crafted an intricately weaved mystery surrounding the missing girls, with an abduction history going back a quarter of a decade. Those who find Keller's kidnapping of Alex Jones (Paul Dano) distasteful and his subsequent beating of Alex brutal, I'd have to agree that it was beyond the pale for a movie treatment. The beating part anyway. You could understand the man's frustration, but having no success in getting any information, he should have backed off long before he did.
But even that part of it was handled well. Loki conceded to Grace Dover (Maria Bello) that her husband would probably go to jail, so there was no getting around the idea that Keller would get away with what he did. For his part, Gyllenhaal displayed another nuanced character in Detective Loki, just about a hundred eighty degree turn from his depiction of news gatherer Lou Bloom in "Nightcrawler". There were times he showed remarkable restraint dealing with Keller, making me think about the way cops in real life situations have to hold back on their emotions when dealing with distraught victims of a crime. He and the rest of the supporting cast put in very credible performances.