Our Review
For a certain kind of movie to work, you have to click with the main character. If you're not on their side, what's the point?
Gone offers plenty of reasons to side with its heroine Jill (Amanda Seyfried and her teary doe eyes). A year before the events of the film, she was kidnapped by a mysterious sociopath. That's terrible! After her miraculous escape, the police didn't believe her story. That's awful! Her would-be killer roams free, preparing to attack again. Which is horrible!
Now, Jill returns home from working a late shift at the diner to discover that her sister Molly (Emily Wickersham) is missing. Terrible! Jill believes she's been kidnapped by the same man who took her — but the police still don't believe her. Awful! So Jill is the only one who can save Molly from being tortured to death. Horrible!
This all primes us to side with Jill, to cheer for her grim determination to rescue her sister. At first, this is easy: Jill is fighting against a world that's, at best, different to the dangers faced by young women, and, at worst, contemptuous of and even complicit in them.
But as Gone goes on, it starts dropping "clues" meant to cast doubt on Jill's quest. Maybe she really is making it all up. Maybe, the film comes close to suggesting, young women really are as skittish and foolish as those indifferent detectives believe them to be. Siding with Jill becomes harder and harder.
It's Jill's own actions that ultimately make it impossible to side with her &mdash when she starts venturing alone into abandoned buildings and night-time forests, it's hard not to think of those tired horror movie cliches about the girls who run up the stairs when they should be running out the front door.
There's a big difference between being a strong female character and just being stupid. Jill, unfortunately, falls on the wrong side of the divide.
