Ever since she was kidnapped from her bed and thrown into a murder pit in the woods, and barely escaping from a serial killer looking to turn her into just another missing person statistic, Jill (Amanda Seyfried) has been a little intense. As in, gun in her handbag, nearly killing the instructor in her self-defence class intense. Presumably coming home after your ordeal to find no-one believes you and then being thrown into an insane asylum will do that to you. And having the local police pretty much roll their eyes and pull faces every time you try to present them with new evidence wouldn’t help much either.
Still, at least her sister Molly (Emily Wickersham) is living with her, and she seems to believe Jill’s telling the truth. But then, Molly goes missing and no-one believes Jill’s increasingly frantic claims that the killer is back, and, before you know it, the Portland PD are chasing after a supposedly crazy woman who’s going around waving a gun in the face of anyone she thinks might be a suspect in Molly’s disappearance. Which is actually quite a long list: could it be the creepy locksmith and his dodgy son? The sinister guy across the road who likes his privacy? The scuzzy student with a lame band who used to hang around Molly? Molly’s boyfriend? Molly’s drinking habit? New cop on the force Detective Hood (Wes Bentley) who dresses like his job involves patrolling nightclubs 24 hours a day? Or the mysterious stranger who one passer-by describes as having “rapey eyes”?
With this kind of thriller, the one thing you don’t want is subtlety. Well, I assume there’s a lot of things you don’t want in this kind of film (glove puppets?) but the biggest mistake this kind of film can make is trying to downplay what is naturally melodramatic and over-the-top material. So the good news here is that this is a film not afraid to have someone creeping around a darkened house then opening a door and being startled by a cat jumping out at them. Ducking down and holding your hand up to hide your face from passing police? Jill goes there. Hiding from pursuers by chatting to a couple of teenage girls about how your brother is Justin Beiber’s tour manager? Hey, why wouldn’t that work?
More interestingly for a film that’s not all that complex – Jill is trying to solve a mystery while on the run from the cops who think she’s a danger to herself - Gone does a pretty good job of leaving the door open to the idea that maybe Jill really is crazy. Obviously she’s not – she’s the hero of the story – but then there’ll be a moment where you’re reminded that maybe a woman running around stealing cars and waving a gun isn’t someone you want to see going off her meds.
Balancing that out is a strong feminist angle where almost all the cops treating her with disdain (plus all the suspects) are men and the only people willing to really help her out are women (notably Dexter’s Jennifer Carpenter). This kind of sex-divide isn’t all that unusual for a horror-tinged thriller, but once again this film picks up the ball and goes with it, making the subtext big and loud because it’s just more fun that way.
Holding all this together is a great performance from Seyfried, who hits just the right spot between creepily manic and justifiably stressed-out. She manages to keep her character consistent whether she’s babbling away trying to get information out of a shopkeeper or heading out steely-eyed to face her darkest fears. Gone could have easily fallen apart or turned into an extended joke and it’s largely thanks to her strong central performance that this film works as well as it does. Hopefully this’ll lead to bigger and better things for her; as for the career of the cat who jumps out of the cupboard, that’s probably peaked.
Three stars