Bound to Vengeance

She’s been locked up in a cellar and sexually abused, but when Tina Ivlev’s put-upon heroine manages to brain her sicko captor with a brick, her troubles are only just beginning in this wilfully unpleasant indie shocker. The discovery that her gravel-voiced tormentor (Richard Tyson) is holding numerous other girls at different locations prompts her to keep him on a dogcatcher-style leash and drive around to free the victims. That certainly puts a kink in our narrative expectations but essentially proves an excuse to slaver over the degradation of more scantily clad young women, strung along by a plot heavy on groanworthy coincidence and dialogue of dismaying banality.

Ivlev has a fierce screen presence deserving a superior context, while experienced composer Simon Boswell provides plenty of nervy guitar feedback. But it’s a struggle to glean many positives from this ugly, superficial offering, which gestures towards feminist empowerment while heaping mental and physical hurt on every one of its female characters. Mercifully, it clocks in at under 80 minutes, but even that’s woefully padded out by repetitive cameraphone footage of the protagonist in ‘happier’ days.