Kidnapping Stella is a 2019 thriller about a kidnapped woman and her efforts to derail the plans of two masked abductors.
There’s a genuine sense of menace at the start of writer and director Thomas Sieben‘s caustic thriller Kidnapping Stella, a clean, harrowing efficiency to a post title sequence that sets up a truly terrifying premise. It’s not sustainable of course, the film losing traction the more it progresses, this a German remake of the superior 2009 film The Disappearance of Alice Creed. However, it’s an earnest effort that while straying from the original in some important revelations, is well acted and works hard to be authentic even as lapses in credibility run it off the rails.
After two men, Tom (Max von der Groeben) and Vic (Clemens Schick), methodically prepare a room for something obviously very bad, they drive to a specific street and snatch a woman off the sidewalk. She is Stella (Jella Haase), whom they toss in the back of their soundproof van and deliver to their sealed hideaway, tying her to a bed and gagging her mouth. Wearing masks, they force her to reveal her father’s email, a ransom demand to be made. But plans have a way of falling apart, and soon enough, secrets are out in the open, steadily turning one against the other.
There is, by nature, a cruel streak in all this, the violence, physically and mentally, against Stella perhaps necessary in telling its story but undeniably hard to watch. Fortunately, the movie is more of a mystery than an exercise in brutality, twisting tension out of the small setting and cast. That’s thanks mostly to the good work of Groeben, Schick, and especially Haase, who each find some troubling corners in all this, even as Sieben’s script doesn’t always make much sense.
Far too often the film feels like it has a rigid agenda, an outcome in mind that can only occur if events prior fall precisely in line. That means there is plenty that feels contrived, with the relationship between Tom and Vic never really as complex or played out as it is in the original. This leaves most of the movie sort of perfuctory at best, certainly hitting all the major turns in the road but not all that significant. You get a sense that some of this was padded out, not all that uncommon of course, but it ends up draining some of the momentum its start so smartly generated.
The problem is that Kidnapping Stella never quite feels legit, the connect-the-dots plot all too obvious the more it has to labor to its finale. Saved by some good performances (make sure to watch in the original German), the stage-play aesthetic and good direction keep this a single step better than many in the genre even as the story slowly unravels.