Gone

A frequently disastrous piece of work, Gone follows Amanda Seyfried’s Jill as she’s forced to relive a traumatic kidnapping after her sister vanishes from their shared home – with Jill’s mental problems provoking serious skepticism among several incompetent detectives (ie they believe that both incidents are a product of Jill’s imagination). Filmmaker Heitor Dhalia has infused Gone with a consistently (and incongruously) deliberate pace that alienates the viewer right from the get-go, with the less-than-engrossing nature of the central mystery – ie is Jill crazy or not? – perpetuating the movie’s decidedly tedious vibe. Seyfried’s fine performance is consequently rendered moot, and it’s also worth noting that Dhalia manages to squander a fairly impressive supporting cast (which includes, among others, Nick Searcy, Jennifer Carpenter, and Wes Bentley). The pervasively misguided bent of Allison Burnett’s screenplay is reflected most keenly in the attitude of the aforementioned cops, as it quickly becomes clear that their skepticism is dictated less by logic and more by the demands of the progressively shaky storyline. The film’s hopelessly lifeless atmosphere grows more and more problematic as time passes, with the absolutely interminable climax, in which Seyfried’s unsympathetic character drives around a dark forest for what feels like an hour, cementing Gone‘s place as an aggressively pointless and boring thriller.

* out of ****