Well I went into this movie expecting an average thriller, with mediocre acting and a lot of suspense. The kind of movie that deserves a rating of 6, when it meets the expectations.
What did I get? Well I got a little bit of a below-average thriller, then things started to change What I expect from an intelligent twist in a story is that it gives you some clues about the twist, without making it too obvious, and when it happens you remember those clues and it makes sense, and it makes more sense than before the twist.
This movie gives you clues about things, and you follow them and SUPRIISE IT WAS EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT WE HAVE BEEN TELLING YOU!
HEAVY Spoilers from now on.
First our protagonist(?) has her kid kidnapped, by the "tall man". The kidnapper looks like the tall man. And at this point you can guess who the tall man is, even with very little information. Then we get really below average chase and combat scenes, and some ridiculous things like our protagonist tracking in the night in a forest thanks to the movie light crew who went into the forest and helped our mother in distress...
And then TWIST! Turns out, the "tall man" was actually the original mother , who for some reason dressed like the tall man, and for some reason is strong enough take down and tie up a woman much younger than her, no screaming, no nothing, as though she were a pro. And she trained her dog to attack humans as well.
And our protagonist was the kidnapper, and she kidnapped a kid in a small town and just kept him at her own house like she stole a stapler from the office. Mind you, there is a federal agent and police looking into these kidnappings constantly.
Are we supposed to be impressed by this, because it surprised us? The twist is horrible because it makes the story make LESS sense, to the point of being ridiculous. Might as well have told us she was an alien.
Oh, and before this this "twist" there was another that made us think that the townsfolk was organized, and they kidnapped the children. But I will not bother you with those details.
The writer is trying to impress the audience by trolling them.
The "point" was that they were helping those poor backwards family children by giving them to the rich who wanted to take care of them. I had not thought that I would have to explain why this was ridiculous, but when I read the comments here I saw that some people seem to think this movie was "deep". The protagonist claimed that the parents who were broken and depressed made their children the same way and the cycle must be broken.
First of all, you don't need to kidnap anyone, if a child is truly subjected to abuse and deprivation then you can use legal means to break the cycle.
Second, just because someone had a parent who was unlucky in life does not make them lost, it is quite the opposite, parents learn from their mistakes and give this to their children, and if they don't the children themselves do that. Most of our valuable experience comes from hardships. It is possible that some talented children will not have these talents explored because they did not have the resources, but this is not a reason to go kidnapping random kids. You could just support them with the proper instruction. Maybe some parents will not let that happen, but that is not a reason to go kidnapping children.
Third, yes the government does not do a perfect job with social services and public schools, because guess what? Not many people want to pay a lot of money for good education of random kids they are unrelated to.
This is not going to change because those random kids happened to be kidnapped by scary man with black robes, traumatized, and brainwashed into forgetting their families.
I know making judgement about people is poor manners, but if I had to say, I would guess that this was written by a middle-class family kid who was raised among richer people, and just blamed his parents because not everything is his life was absolutely perfect.
