Powerful premise, but disappointing execution

Rating: 4/10 (12 July 2019)

This film's premise is soul-crushingly powerful. Hearing about the similar real-life cases in Austria like Natascha Kampusch and Josef Fritzl was incredibly devastating, and honestly even quite hard to believe. If events like this didn't indeed happen in reality, the film would arguably be labelled as "absurdly unbelievable". But shockingly this does have a very real backing. The writer's decision to keep this fictional was respectable; truly basing this on a real story or person would not be very tactful and may come off as trivializing the trauma of the victims.
There is much gained from the premise alone, especially one as relatively unexplored as this one is. However, executionally there were so many problems that the premise shines as all this film really has. As powerful as it may be, it cannot save poor acting, narrative, direction, and even story. In fact, these elements even mitigated the brutal power that stems from the premise.
The mom played by Brie Larson is the key actress we see the most in the entire movie, and unfortunately her acting was awful enough that it was tough to actually bear any semblance of sympathy for her character. Her crying was not believable, and that's an important one to get right for this kind of role. Otherwise she mostly came off as just annoying. The kid was mostly annoying and very spoiled too. Perhaps this was somewhat intentional: after being trapped for 7 years, one is not exactly going to be a testament to human behavior, especially not a child. But it did make it tough to garner any true sympathy for the characters. The actors who did a great job in this film were the female police officer and all 3 grandparents (including the creepy stepdad), but they weren't major enough to make much of an impact.
Without sympathy as a forefront, it begs the question: What is the narrative of this film? Emma Donoghue seemed to just hang back and portray some snippets out of Jack's life, all without cohesion, relying purely on the premise alone to carry the narrative. The beginning setup and up until breaking out of the room was clear enough, but everything that happens after is very muddy. Why are we seeing the aftermath, the grandparents, the TV interview, the newfound daily life of the child? It's clear that Donoghue wished to show all the complicated facets of this situation, both during and after. But this conflicts with the character's perspective whose eyes we're seeing the film through, namely the child. We should be seeing an interesting perspective on the outside world, and how everything is brand new to him now. We get only a small sliver of that, when he's looking at the sky while in the truck. After that, all that the latter half of the film really boils down to, without proper narrative, is just pointless melodrama and immature conflict shown for zero reason. What is actually compelling or interesting about any of this from the child's eyes?
The first half of the story was decent enough except for one very unbelievable part: why would the guy not check if the child was really dead? It would have been very simple for him to do. It is really tough to believe that he successfully didn't fall for any of her tricks for 7 long years and now proved stupid enough to fall for this. It is possible that she played a masterfully long game and simply never tried any tricks up until that, so he wouldn't have any reason to suspect her of trickery. But this was not shown or built up, as we enter the film 7 years in already. Hence, regardless of the hypothetical believability of the situation, what is displayed or presented to us as a cinema viewer comes off as strange and not believable.
Overall this was a disappointment. A premise as strong as this one has sadly been ruined by just plain bad filmmaking.