Abducted and studied by a group of strangers, a single mother’s (Noomi Rapace) genetic abnormality causes her to transform into her true self.

PLOT: A single mother (Noomi Rapace) and her son are abducted, and she’s forced to endure a series of tests which her captors hope will unlock a secret within her DNA.

Noomi Rapace plays Renee, a divorced single mom who out of the blue one day is kidnapped and kept for experimentation by a cult who believe that putting people into extreme terror situations causes their nervous system to “rupture” and morph into a higher order of being.

Early in the film, feeds from small video cameras show that Renee is under surveillance; a small device clamped on to one of her car’s tires suggests even more sinister goings-on. Sure enough, a blowout sends Renee to the side of the road and also to a rather elaborately staged abduction, during which her face is wrapped in shiny black duct tape.

Why shiny black, you may ask. Indeed. As it eventually becomes clear that Renee ought to be delivered to her captors in good health, the better for them to manipulate it, you’d think that her handling might call for more actual care. But, you know, shiny black duct tape looks cool and threatening. Soon Renee is strapped down, hard, to a metal gurney, which makes a lot of metallic noises as she bangs her body against it. She’s in a room with a triple-deadbolt lock that makes a neat “Bang! Bang! Bang!” clang whenever it’s shut. The lighting of the room is peach-purple and the walls look like rotting meat. The production design is a tired mix of cliché and dink. A couple of seeming functionaries, played by Michael Chiklis and Lesley Manville, show up, don silly rubber goggled with extended lens holders, and phone in some menace. A fellow prisoner gibbers to Renee through a heating vent, mentioning something called “G-ten-twelve-X.” When she repeats the letters and numbers to her captors, one of them says “If you find out what that is then you’ve made real progress.”

Release date: April 28, 2017 (USA)
Director: Steven Shainberg
Screenplay: Steven Shainberg, Brian Nelson
Producers: Steven Shainberg, Andrea Iervolino, Monika Bacardi, Andrew Lazar, Christina Weiss Lurie
Steven Shainberg, Brian Nelson

Cast