From director Amanda Gusack comes The Betrayed. Starring Melissa George (Dr. Sadie Harris, from the most recent season of Grey’s Anatomy), this film is a psychological thriller that takes some time to absorb. It also takes some knowledge of people to even begin to attempt to figure out what is truth and what are lies.
The Betrayed’s plot is fairly simple. A woman and her young son are involved in a car accident. When the woman awakes she is in an abandoned warehouse and being tortured for information she doesn’t know about the man she thought was her husband. Her young son is constantly threatened by her captors, forcing her to cooperate. Gusack teases the viewer a bit with plenty of opportunity for the captive to fall in love with the captor and keeping this area purposefully gray elevates the intrigue more than a little.
Where this film really stumbles is its execution. 99% of the movie takes place in one room (the parts that don’t are flashback sequences) and it takes a superb actor to pull off keeping your attention for that long with no change of scenery. Melissa George is not able to pull it off. Though she tries fairly hard I believe, it just doesn’t work. She’s just not convincing enough in my opinion. That said, the movie also moves fairly slowly, which makes it kind of boring until the lies all start to become a revealing web. When that happens the movie becomes great and the last half hour is superb in both delivery and pace. Unfortunately, you could probably watch just the last 30 minutes and still understand everything that is happening.
Overall, this is a mediocre movie at best. Still, the ending makes it worth your time so I’d suggest it for those of you looking for something to do on a slow weekend evening.
Reviewed by Mark Fisher
