FAMILY VANISHED
US, 2018, 86 minutes, Colour.
Kelly Packard, Jennifer Taylor, Madison Dirks, Todd Cahoon, Megan Hitler, Elise Luthman, Butch Klein.
Directed by Robert Malenfant.
A television film, something of a potboiler – and, if an audience is identifying with the target family, an emotionally enraging experience!
The film opens with the family in a luxury home in California, suspicious because they are all wearing black gloves in bed. It soon emerges that they are a home invasion family, parents and daughter, making themselves at home while the owners are in Hawaii.
The family returns, bewildered by what is happening in the house, tied up and gagged, subjected to all kinds of humiliation. The wife in the family, Jennifer Taylor, seems to be in charge. The husband, Todd Cahoon, has something of a roving eye. The daughter is very surly. The attacking family are continually criticising the owners for their wealth, their arrogance, presumption against workers…
The husband, who suffers from asthma, is kept in the attic in the heat for some time, the aggressive wife finds the owner’s diary and reads aloud her response to a one night stand with the neighbour.
They pressurise the wife, who is an art dealer has had a success selling a painting for hundreds of thousands of dollars in Hawaii, to phone the bank and arrange for a cash withdrawal the next day. After a day of humiliation, the family is left alone, the plan being for the wife to go to the bank, withdraw the money, her having an earpiece, being filmed all the time with the warning that, if anything goes wrong, the other members of the family will be shot.
On her return, everybody is placed in a van and taken out into the countryside, blindfolded, where they kneel and there is the beginning of the digging of graves. However, the neighbour has been curious and has followed them, the wife being shrewd and loosening her bonds and hitting the woman with the shovel and the family escaping, getting a lift back to the city and going to the police. In the meantime, the neighbour is pursued and is killed (with audience empathy less towards him because of the information about the one night stand).
The police have investigated and suspect the owners to have engineered the whole situation. However, vengeance sets in and the couple remember a clue about the diner and apple pie. The thieving couple also check into the wife’s computer and so they have a location, identify the restaurant, go out into the countryside, follow the daughter to the hideout – and an eventual confrontation, including their own daughter tracking them down.
Life resumes – in the hope it will be better, the police suspicious of what has happened but allowing the family to go.
A television movie to get the blood boiling and identifying for revenge while sitting in the lounge chair watching.
