From writer-director Simon Rumley (Johnny Frank Garrett’s Last Word) comes another relentlessly cruel low-budget nightmare.
Crushed takes as it subject matter the dubious phenomenon of “crush” videos, at least in theory. Crush videos are real-life footage of live animals being killed, including crushed to death, for the purposes of fetishism. It’s a topic Rumley has already explored in the “P is for Pressure” segment of The ABCs of Death, and perhaps in that short he managed to get out everything he had to say about these videos, because they’re more or less incidental to the plot of Crushed despite its name.
Instead, we get the story of Christian vicar Fr. Daniel (Steve Oram), living in Bangkok with his wife and, daughter and their new kitten; until, that is, the kitten one day runs away and, in the process of searching for it, the daughter finds herself taken hostage by – coincidence! – the very people responsible for producing and distributing the disturbing crush videos to which she was cruelly exposed earlier that week.
While the girl spends time in relatively cushy captivity, almost – but then not – getting used for a child sexual abuse video, her parents cope with her disappearance in different ways. Fr. Daniel has many long discussions about faith in the course of things, but as great a stroke of casting as Steve Oram playing a vicar should by rights be, he doesn’t really seem that engaged, and I can’t say I blame him. Crushed manages to be too nasty to ever appeal to general audiences, while being too oddly squeamish to really justify its existence. Yes, it’s bleak; but it’s never terribly interesting, and there are simply better bleak movies out there for those seeking that sort of thing – I’d recommend The Vanishing.