There are a lot of things familiar about “Gone,” and none of them are good. Similar to her role in “Red Riding Hood,” as a young woman struggling to figure out who was hunting her and why, Seyfried stars in “Gone” as Jill, who a year or so ago was kidnapped, tied up, and left in a deep, dark ditch in the middle of a park in Portland, Ore. (See: “The Silence of the Lambs.”) She escaped, but few people believed her story, and now after a bunch of prescription pills, Jill is trying to put her life back together by working nights as a waitress and taking self-defense classes. (See: “Enough.”) She’s skittish but determined. She will never be a victim again.
But then she comes home from work one morning to find her sister Molly (Emily Wickersham) missing, even though she left Jill a note asking her to wake her up. Her books are still there and there are no signs of forced entry, but Jill is certain that Molly has been taken. Convinced that her tormentor has come back for Molly because of his obsession with her, Jill decides to pursue him so she can save her sister.
Is Jill a reliable narrator, though? Everything in her head seems a little bit jumbled, and she jumps to conclusions wildly. Couldn’t Molly, a college student, just be off at a study session or a party? Could everything Jill thinks she experienced actually be made up? Local cops like Powers (Daniel Sunjata, of the recent “One for the Money”) and Erica (Katherine Moennig) seem to think the latter, wary to help the girl they think may be living in her own nightmares. They never found the ditch she was supposedly dumped in years ago, so at the police station, they treat her with disbelief and mistrust.
Undeterred, Jill is convinced that she only has a day to find her sister. But as she gets ready for a manhunt—with a gun, a backpack full of supplies, and an ever-trusty black hoodie—the police start searching for her instead. “Gone” then becomes a meandering maze of plot twists, a series of red herrings that director Heitor Dhalia and writer Allison Burnett clearly want to be suspenseful but just … aren’t.
What mostly hurts “Gone” is its stress on style over substance. The movie is set in rainy, cloudy, creepy Portland, and everything is filmed in a deep blue tint that brings to mind how everything in “The Matrix” was green. It’s a frustrating technique that makes scenes bleed together, so you go from one dark, wet location to another dark, wet location. Perhaps Dhalia was trying to infuse the film with a sense of menace, but every scene sinks under the water weight. (Zing!)
Exacerbating that is Dhalia’s use of flashbacks, tilting scenes with whirling cameras and nondescript angles meant to evoke Jill’s confusion. Instead, they come off as amateurish tricks. But it’s not like Burnett’s script is great and Dhalia’s directing drags it down; the former has clearly been influenced by other legendary thrillers like “Se7en” and “Zodiac,” but she can’t reach that level. There’s no nuance in the film’s dialogue—people just bark at each other, all the men are suspicious and ill-intentioned, all the women malevolent and unhelpful. Good actors like Wes Bentley (who, after how great he was in “American Beauty” all those years ago, finally gets another break in next month’s “The Hunger Games”) and up-and-comer Sebastian Stan (from last summer’s “Captain America: The First Avenger”) are basically used as pretty mannequins, relegated only to standing around and looking incredulous as Seyfried yells at them about her sister. So. Much. Yelling.
Ah yes, Seyfried. She’s not as glammed up here as she was in “Red Riding Hood” or “In Time,” but just because she’s more natural-looking doesn’t mean she’s a better actress. Lines like “I’ll sleep when he’s dead” have no power coming from her lips. She’s too often breathy or flat, not injecting enough emotion into scenes that require her to worry about her sister or consider her own sanity. She’s either hysterical or stoic; there’s no middle ground.
A film that centers on a woman fighting back can be a good thing: Jodie Foster proved it in “The Brave One” in 2007, and Gina Carano stole the show in last month’s “Haywire.” “Gone,” however, despite giving its main girl a gun, is not a feminist fist-pump. It’s not even a high five. Just ignore it and move along.
