Trapped review – rough and ready abuse story that piles bleakness upon bleakness

Raye, played by Gina Jones is, as the title of the film suggests, trapped. She is trapped in a bleak job, in a bleak relationship and in a bleak house. The bleakest element of this trifecta of bleakness is the relationship: she is involved with the utterly unlovely Frank (Shane McCormick) who, as one character observes, is the sort of guy who throws his entire life away then lashes out in every direction, blaming everyone but himself for how things have turned out. It’s hard to fathom why she stays with someone so awful – except, well, that’s the way the world works sometimes. Their dynamic is an abusive one, and in modern therapeutic parlance, they share the trauma bond of unstable, abusive childhoods. It’s not that Raye doesn’t know Frank’s no good; it’s that she doesn’t believe she deserves better, or that better exists. While Trapped’s poster art promises some sort of Captivity-style torture porn slasher horror, it may be interesting to know that the film was originally called Beneath the Silence, a title that gestures towards more serious dramatic aspirations. In fact, Trapped’s understanding of abuse is considerably more sophisticated than the rest of what it offers. It is a low-budget affair that, at times, has a rough-and-ready raw power that transcends its limited production values, but too often the standard of performance and crudeness of the craft makes it hard to take seriously. The script is littered with exposition – for example, a half-brother reminds his sibling that they have “different mums”, a fact that would perhaps be very well known to the characters; it’s clearly there for the benefit of the audience. The largely on-the-nose dialogue does provide occasional moments of joy: at one point, someone stands up at a funeral and says: “He was a cunt and everyone in this room knows it.” Any movie with that in it is doing something right, even if what it’s doing is, effectively, a post-watershed and feature-length episode of EastEnders. • Trapped is on digital platforms from 17 November.