FILM FRENZY

Laz Alonso (center) in Detained (Photos: Kinogo Pictures)

By Matt Brunson

DETAINED
★★★ (out of four)
DIRECTED BY Felipe Mucci
STARS Abbie Cornish, Laz Alonso

The question “Who is Keyser Söze?” gets reconfigured as “Who is Jovan?” in the new indie thriller Detained. The key difference? The Oscar-winning The Usual Suspects, the movie that sheltered the enigmatic Keyser Söze, was informed by that fateful question, with the answer wrapped up in practically every scene of the picture. In Detained, the question ofttimes feels superfluous, and the answer proves to be the weakest element in this otherwise accomplished film.

After a prologue in which Jovan is name-dropped, the film shifts to Rebecca (Abbie Cornish), a woman who wakes up in a police station after a night of drinking and flirting at a bar. Rebecca can’t remember what happened that previous evening — a curious situation, as she can hold her liquor with the best of them — but she’s informed by two detectives that she was involved in a hit and run. In the ensuing Good Cop / Bad Cop routine, Detective Avery (Laz Alonso) is the former and Detective Moon (Moon Bloodgood) is the latter, although neither make much headway with their suspect. Rebecca’s young lawyer (Justin H. Mein) is ineffectual, so she’s tossed into a holding cell with a pampered rich girl (Josefine Lindegaard) and a raving nutcase (Silas Weir Mitchell). A fight breaks out, an inmate ends up dead, a cop also ends up dead, and Rebecca suddenly finds her situation having catapulted from bad to worst.

It’s at this point that Detained starts getting very twisty, and it’s hard to reveal much more without rolling in spoilers (then again, while the plot synopsis on IMDb remains vague, the one on Rotten Tomatoes trumpets the first major twist, so…). Suffice to say that practically none of the players are complete innocents, and a couple deserve the grisly ends that come their way. The crux of the film is that Rebecca is trapped in a horrible situation, but rather than allow fear to paralyze her, she instead proves to be more resourceful than anyone imagined.

As long as the movie focuses on Rebecca versus the world, Detained delivers the goods expected from a sharp thriller, and the movie is recommendable on that basis alone. But the “Who is Jovan?” angle manages to only get in the way. Jovan is described by everyone as a criminal mastermind whose true identity is unknown but who has no problem murdering people and has a penchant for setting fires (Jovan must be Keyser Söze’s cousin or grandchild or something, given the similarities). It’s obvious that one of the characters we’re watching on screen must be Jovan — otherwise, what’s the point? — but as matters play out, only a couple of the gathered group can be treated as serious possibilities since it’s of course not going to be the person everyone suspects and most of the others would be completely unbelievable as such a criminal kingpin. Yet when Jovan’s identity is finally revealed (though many viewers will have guessed it well before the denouement), it still fails to convince, feeling more like an anticlimactic lunge for one more twist rather than something which springs naturally from the material.

Still, there’s no faulting the performances, with Cornish (perhaps best known for her starring role in Jane Campion’s Bright Star and as Woody Harrelson’s wife in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) a standout in the central role (she and Alonso also served as producers on the picture). Also worth noting is the screenplay by Felipe Mucci (who also directed) and Jeremy Palmer — barring that one misstep involving you-know-Who, it’s packed with finely wrought exchanges between what proves to be a rich assortment of unusual suspects.

(Detained opens August 2 in limited theatrical release and will also be available via streaming.)