Home invasion flicks roughly follow the same formula these days, where a cat-and-mouse game between a sadistic killer and unsuspecting victims is played out over two hours. Our home is our sanctuary, and the one place where we can truly feel safe and be ourselves, and the thought of being threatened in any way is dreadful. In Eddie Augustin’s Hostage, the notion that the dweller inside the home is the one who suffers is turned on its head, the result of which is cringeworthy in both intended and unintended ways.

We meet teenage cheerleader Ashely (Nicole Henderson) as she’s sneaking back into her house after a night out, only to be startled by a sudden noise that turns out to be a burglar (Mike Cannz). We find out in the midst of this that it’s Christmas Eve, and as the thief is preoccupied filing his bag with various trinkets inside the home, Ashley and father, Thomas (Daryl Marks) manage to apprehend him. They quickly tie him to a chair, and it’s obvious at this point that these two appear much more capable than the average family, especially once mom Grace (Maria Jimena Osorio) shows up. 

From this point, the movie launches into an all-out madhouse of cheesy dialogue, psychological games, and baffling subplots that meander in and out of the main plot in disheveled fashion. We get to know Ashley, and her dysfunctional upbringing, from a series of monologues and B-plot flashbacks, which the movie switches back and forth between in disorderly ways. She’s not your typical sweet young girl, and as the film progresses, we learn just how deranged she and her entire family are. 

Hostage tries valiantly to be a psychological thriller mixed with notes of girl-power and anti-hero thematic elements, but ultimately gets weighed down by clunky dialogue and nonsensical situations. While there is ample focus on the characters and their maladjusted ways, it tends to go too far into the depraved, and does so with enough ambiguity that it’s difficult to discern the creators’ intent. There’s F bombs aplenty, which isn’t necessarily a shock when it comes to this type of story, but also an unfortunate amount of racial slurs. While it’s clear, to a point, that this is intended to emphasize how brutal and awful these people are, it ends up feeling intrinsically uncomfortable. 

The cast does the best they can do with the script work, with Osorio as the distinct stand-out, despite the fact that Henderson has by far the most screen time. This is an obviously low-budget production, and while points can’t be taken away for that factor alone, there are moments of poor lighting and muffled sound that do distract from the viewing experience. 

Hostage is primarily an example of an interesting concept mixed with poor execution and technique. If enabled with a script re-work to include less of the awkward dialogue and cringeworthy language, and more focus on the enticing main plot, the entertainment quotient could have been upped significantly. 

What it does offer is a classic false hero narrative that gives you the conundrum of not knowing who to root for. Ashley is a complex character, whose motives are complicated and multi-layered, and you’re likely to toggle between feeling sorry for her and being disgusted by her. Which, in essence, is the sign of good writing; it just is too bogged down by the other complications to be allowed to truly shine. 

                                                                                                   5 Out Of 10