Critic Reviews

• William Goss, Film.com

  Survival horror has rarely been approached so sparingly and yet, for all there is to admire... the initial sense of potential suspense gives way to the creeping contempt of familiarity.

• Stephen Holden, New York Times

  Starting as a coldly realistic thriller, this film eventually loses its bearings as the director Miguel Ángel Vivas succumbs to a fit of nihilism, transforming "Kidnapped" into gruesome tit-for-tat torture porn.

• Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com

  My eyes never left the screen and my attention never wandered; in a restricted, technical sense of the term, "Kidnapped" is a masterpiece.

• David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

  Gripping but grueling, this Spanish debut feature scores on technical prowess but its nihilistic viciousness is hard to take.

• Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York

  Some kind of napping for sure...

• Nick Pinkerton, Village Voice

  As most of Kidnapped is devoted to watching people in extreme duress, leaving room for little else, it follows that the film exists solely to be "intense."

• Laura Kern, Film Comment Magazine

  Thoroughly unsettling.

• John Gholson, Cinematical

  If you need to challenge your personal threshold for watching realistic human suffering, then look no further than this nihilistic Spanish home invasion thriller.

• Anton Bitel, Little White Lies

  this is the horror of hopelessness and nihilism made thrillingly visceral, without any of the distancing buffers of monsters or the supernatural.

• Thomas Caldwell, Cinema Autopsy

  Kidnapped is a middling film, although it does have some impressive elements.

• Shaun Munro, What Culture

  Plenty diverting from a stylistic perspective, but the story behind the flair is positively stone-age.

• Jeremy Heilman, MovieMartyr.com

  Vivas, by generally refusing to cut, imbues Kidnapped with more gory details than the average thriller. The narrative cost at which this verisimilitude comes, however, seems a touch too high.

• Dustin Putman, DustinPutman.com

  More a grim, crafty exercise rather than anything deeper, but it still delivers the desired impact.

• Erik Childress, eFilmCritic.com

  Kidnapped proves to be the rule and the exception as writer/director Miguel Ángel Vivas has a few tricks up his sleeves on the fringes of the same old ones.

• Noel Murray, AV Club

  While Kidnapped doesn't add anything substantially new to the tradition, Vivas hits his marks with ruthless efficiency.

• Brian Orndorf, BrianOrndorf.com

  Truthfully, the picture is punishment, often stumbling into superfluous rage, but there's plenty of slick filmmaking mischief here to examine when the movie gets sloppy with harsh acts of shock value.

• Marshall Fine, Hollywood & Fine

  Relies on the nerve-wracking effect of women's screams and hysterical sobbing for tension...an exercise in audience torture more than anything else.

• Nick Schager, Slant Magazine

  Whereas Vivas's aesthetic is initially intimate, a raft of split-screens and circuitous tracking shots soon call undue attention to themselves.

• Prairie Miller, NewsBlaze

  There's likely an audience for this sort of paranoid simulated snuff where enjoying the pain of others is key. But in a world now where gleeful heads of state boast giddily how they've bombed or executed anonymous victims into oblivion, is it any wonder.

Read all 19 critic reviews