The Tortured 2010 Rant

Why The Tortured Frustrated Me More on Rewatch

A while back I watched The Tortured and I did not care much for it outside of the twist. At the time, I thought I liked the twist because it did something different, and I assumed that a lot of the people who hated the movie were just uncomfortable with the fact that they had enjoyed watching this supposedly guilty man get tortured. But after rewatching the movie, I understand the frustration a lot more. The twist itself is not a bad idea. The problem is how the movie gets there and what it does with the reveal afterward.

First of all, I still do not understand why people talk about the torture in this movie like it is some of the most brutal shit ever put on screen. People describe it like Craig and Elise mutilate this man, slice him apart, destroy his body, and leave him barely recognizable. That is not what happens. Compared to a lot of other torture movies and even other revenge movies, what happens here is actually pretty tame. Most of the torture affects him in the moment. Yes, it hurts. Yes, he is restrained, helpless, screaming, and obviously suffering. But by the end of the movie he can still walk, talk, move around, and function. They do not cut pieces off of him, horribly mutilate him, or turn him into some destroyed body. People sometimes describe the movie like it is a nonstop slice-and-dice gore fest, and it really is not.

The torture also does not last nearly as long as people make it sound. The whole captivity is around two days, and most of the actual torture is on the first day. The second day barely has that much. So when people say the movie is just nonstop torture, I honestly wonder if we watched the same movie. I actually like that the movie is not overly gory. I do not think it needed to be some disgusting gore fest. In fact, I think keeping the torture less extreme helps the ending because the horror is supposed to come from the fact that they did all of this to an innocent man, not from watching someone get torn apart for an hour.

But that brings me to the twist itself. The more I rewatch the movie, the more I think the prisoner switch was a terrible way to pull it off. The first time you watch the movie, you can look back and think the twist was right in front of you the whole time. There is even that scene where they watch John being moved, then the movie cuts and shows the prisoner farther away in the dark, and you assume it is still John. On a rewatch, you know that the person you are looking at is actually Patrick. On paper, that sounds clever.

The problem is that we are watching the movie through a camera. Craig and Elise are actually there. They are standing right in front of this man. They are touching him, talking to him, restraining him, removing his gag, shining lights on him, and spending hours with him. And the man on that table does not even look like John. Seriously, when I rewatched the second half, I kept staring at him thinking, how the fuck do you not see that this is a completely different guy?

People say Craig and Elise were blinded by revenge, but I do not buy that as an excuse. Being blinded by revenge can make you ignore warning signs. It can make you refuse to believe someone. It can make you assume they are lying because you are too angry to consider another possibility. It does not make you unable to recognize a completely different face. That is where the movie loses me. The filmmakers can hide things from us using editing, darkness, distance, and camera angles, but Craig and Elise are not watching the movie. They are standing in the room with him. So when you rewatch the movie and start noticing all of these clues, it does not make the twist feel smarter. It just makes the parents look stupid.

Then there is Patrick’s memory loss, which feels like one of the most obvious plot devices in the movie. The movie needs Patrick to not clearly explain who he is because the second he does, the whole twist starts falling apart. During the first torture scene he is gagged, so fine. He cannot explain anything. But then before the gas-mask scene they remove the gag. That should have been the moment when he immediately started asking who these people were and why they were doing this to him. Instead, he says almost nothing useful, they suffocate him, and only afterward does he start talking, except now he conveniently has memory problems. How convenient. Because if he did not have amnesia, the obvious thing for him to say would be that his name is Patrick and he has no idea why they are doing this to him. At that point the torture should basically stop while Craig and Elise figure out what the hell is going on.

That is what bothers me most about the twist. The idea itself is not bad. Two grieving parents believing they are punishing the man who murdered their child only to discover that they tortured an innocent person is genuinely disturbing. But the movie has to force too many things to happen perfectly for the reveal to work. They have to accidentally grab the wrong prisoner. They have to somehow not notice that he looks different from John. Patrick has to be gagged early so he cannot explain himself. Once the gag comes off, he has to conveniently fail to clearly identify himself. He has to overhear enough about Benjamin beforehand so that he can accidentally sound like he knows something about the crime. And Craig and Elise have to ignore every weird thing happening right in front of them. At some point it stops feeling tragic and starts feeling like the writers are forcing the twist to stay hidden.

And then, after all of that, the movie does not even let Craig and Elise find out what they actually did. That is probably the part that pisses me off the most. The audience finds out that they tortured an innocent man. The audience finds out that this man eventually kills himself. The audience is left sitting there with all of that guilt and horror while Craig and Elise apparently go on believing they tortured their son’s murderer. Why the fuck do only we have to feel bad? We did not torture him. They did. Why is the audience the one forced to sit there feeling horrible while the people who actually caused all of this walk away thinking they got revenge on the right person? That feels insulting to the audience.

If the twist is supposed to mean something, then make the people who caused the tragedy actually face it. Let Craig and Elise find out. Let them realize that every scream they ignored came from an innocent man. Let them realize that every time they told themselves he deserved what was happening, they were wrong. Let them realize that this man died because of what they did. That is the interesting part. That is the movie I wanted to see. Instead, the movie basically says surprise, wrong guy, and then ends. Nothing is really resolved. There is no real fallout, no emotional payoff, and no moment where Craig and Elise have to deal with what they have done. The movie finally reaches the most interesting part of its own story and then stops.

The more I think about it, the more I wish they had removed the prisoner switch completely. That is how I would have written the twist. There would be no Patrick, no second prisoner, and no switch. Craig and Elise would kidnap John, the actual man they intended to kidnap. They recognize him. They know exactly who he is. He knows Benjamin’s name because he really was accused of killing him. Everything matches. The twist would be that John was innocent the entire time.

Maybe the police arrested the wrong man. Maybe John was wrongfully convicted. Maybe he took a plea deal because he was terrified that going to trial would get him an even worse sentence. Maybe the trial had not even happened yet, but Craig and Elise were already completely convinced that the police had the right guy. Any of those would work better because now the mistake is not that they somehow grabbed a completely different-looking prisoner in the dark. The mistake is that everybody was wrong about John’s guilt.

That would make John’s denials actually matter. When he tells Craig and Elise that he did not kill their son, they have to decide whether they believe him.
They can look at the evidence and keep convincing themselves that the police must have gotten the right guy. Then later the real killer is found.

Now the twist becomes much stronger. It is no longer that Craig and Elise grabbed the wrong prisoner. It is that the police were wrong, the parents were wrong, the court might have been wrong, and everyone was so sure of John’s guilt that an innocent man ended up being tortured because nobody stopped to question whether they actually knew the truth.

That version would also make the movie much better on a rewatch. You could go back and hear John insisting that he was innocent and realize that he was telling the truth the entire time. You could notice little things he said that did not seem important the first time. You could see Elise slowly starting to doubt while Craig keeps refusing to accept it because he is already too deep into what he has done. The clues would actually make the story better instead of just making the characters look stupid.

And most importantly, Craig and Elise would eventually find out. Do not end the movie before that happens. Make them learn that John was innocent. Make them understand exactly what they did. Make them face the fact that they tortured a man over a crime he never committed. Because again, why the fuck should only the audience have to feel guilty? We did not fucking do it.