10×10 is a 2018 thriller about an outwardly ordinary guy who in reality is hiding an obsessive need for revenge against a young woman.
A woman in captivity has been part and parcel to the thriller biz for decades and as such, many of late are thoroughly trying to give it a spin, looking to ring out the tired tropes and flip expectations. Now comes Suzi Ewing‘s latest effort 10×10, a compact, raw little film that tries to do just that, yet wastes a lot of its time on padding, leaving this well-acted but implausible film one for the sidelines.
Making a good living as a florist is Cathy (Kelly Reilly), spending what she most likely amounts to another uneventful day in Georgia. This eventually leads her to a yoga class where all again seems perfectly passable until she walks back to her car and in the parking lot, things take a decidedly dark turn. She is aggressively kidnapped – in broad daylight – by Lewis (Luke Evans), a stranger who promptly drives her off into the country and his isolated fortress of a home, binding her and locking her in a small room with four-foot thick concrete walls. Unsure why’s she been taken, she scrambles for any kind of escape or protection, while Kent eventually comes and presses her for some simple answers though she’s not giving any. As the day wears on, it becomes a game of brains and then violence as who they are and how they are connected begins to emerge.
Admittedly, the entire premise of 10×10 is compelling, even if the whole conceit of it is worn thin. Ewing, working from a script by Noel Clarke, dedicates more than a third of the film to setting it all up, developing at least some of the character’s routines and ambiguous motivations in gearing up for the conflict. That’s especially true of Cathy, whom we see is a well-liked and contributing local with plenty of the same routines we all sort of identify with. She runs a successful shop and keeps customers happy and has exchanges both positive and awkward with people she meets. This establishes a few good hooks in wondering where it’s all going as Kent creepily stalks her about town, setting the two in two plain-as-day molds that are clearly made to be broken.
By the halfway point, we finally get what we came for as the interrogation begins but we’ve already sort of started shopping other options, the plotting mostly uneventful and not very energetic. We’ve all too often seen these kinds of situations before, where a savaged woman is trapped and desperately scratches about her cell in panic while a seeming maniac goes about his day in apparent normality and yet Ewing is committed to sharing lots of both.
As expected, 10×10 brews to a jarring end, with lots of brutal violence, where we finally get some reasons to the madness, not to mention a third party who shows up to add more punch to the story. At about 80 minutes, this is thankfully a brief encounter, but it’s too bad it lacks the urgency it aims for, the film mostly without tension until the predictable bout at the end. It wants to be clever and give our expectations a thump, but these days, that’s par for the course and most audiences are too well trained to be fooled. It ends just about where it should have started, making this a more richly rewarding psychological thriller than another bland potboiler.