Chained

Cinematically speaking, Jennifer Lynch comes with a lot of baggage.The daughter of David Lynch, at 19 she wrote and directed one of the most reviled films of the 1980s, Boxing Helena. Her latest film, Chained, is a seamy exploration of father figures and psychopathy.

Bob is an efficient, taxi-driving serial killer who, after murdering nine year old Tim's mother, tells the terrified boy: "I didn't ask for you but since you're here I'm going to make the most of it." Tim becomes Bob's shackled slave and a witness to his master's frequent murders. The film then jumps forward some years. Tim is now a gaunt, haunted teenager, still a captive, who must now decide whether or not to follow his adoptive "father" into the family business.

If Lynch shares with her father a fascination for the darkness hidden in the everyday, Chained, while gruesome, remains too tied to genre conventions and trite psychology to really disturb. [Keir Roper-Caldbeck]