Let me start with a warning: Jennifer Lynch’s Chained is not a movie you casually throw on during date night unless your idea of a good time includes claustrophobia, moral decay, and a blood-stained game of Go Fish. This is not Dexter with a conscience or Se7en with a flashlight. This is parenting, reimagined by way of Stockholm Syndrome.
The film begins innocently enough; if your idea of innocence includes Julia Ormond treating her nine-year-old son Tim to a horror movie instead of Ice Age 3. Mother of the Year material, clearly. The dad, played with alarming foreshadow by Jake Weber, suggests they take a cab home instead of the bus. You can almost hear the “don’t do it!” echo from the future.
Enter Bob. Bob drives a taxi. Bob wears a hat. Bob is played by Vincent D’Onofrio, which should be your first red flag. D’Onofrio, who once played Thor in Adventures in Babysitting and Private Pyle in Full Metal Jacket, somehow combines both roles here: godlike and unhinged. You know from the moment he mumbles “Hello”, that this man is absolutely going to murder someone in the next five minutes; and he does. Tim’s mom never makes it out of the cab. Tim, however, gets a promotion: live-in slave.
Yes, Bob, who only kills women (a charming quirk), decides to keep the boy. Not out of mercy, mind you, but utility. Tim becomes his cleaner, cook, captive. Bob chains him to the house, literally, and we’re off. The house, once vaguely rural and creepy, devolves into a yellow-brown dungeon, as though the rot of Bob’s moral stench is seeping into the walls. Lynch, ever the artist of the grim and grotesque, captures this with a camera that lingers too long and cuts too quick; just enough to keep you off balance and uncomfortable, which is the whole point.
Tim grows up, but not out. As a teenager (now played with haunted restraint by Eamon Farren), he’s still on the chain, literally and emotionally. Bob, for his part, attempts to mold the boy into a “mini-me” of murder. Think The Lion King, but instead of singing about the circle of life, it’s a dissertation on strangulation technique.
There’s a scene where they play Go Fish using a deck made from women’s driver’s licenses. If you can watch that and still maintain faith in humanity, congratulations. You’re either a sociologist or a horror critic.
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Chained isn’t a horror film in the traditional sense. There are no jump scares, no haunted basements, unless you count Bob. It’s psychological horror: taut, suffocating, and deeply uncomfortable. It doesn’t want to scare you; it wants to scar you. And Lynch, daughter of David, isn’t here to play nice or explain herself. The original title, Rabbit, named after Bob’s nickname for Tim, might’ve captured the grotesque fairy-tale dynamic more poetically. But Chained, well, that hits with all the subtlety of a padlock.
It’s not perfect. The twist ending veers dangerously close to M. Night Shyamalan territory, minus the smirk. But it’s the kind of film that makes you think twice before getting into a cab or trusting anyone who plays Go Fish with too much enthusiasm.
D’Onofrio is, predictably, spectacular. Equal parts terrifying and tragic, he gives Bob a grotesque interiority; like if Travis Bickle read parenting books. Ormond, in her brief screen time, reminds us why she’s one of the best to portray emotional nuance with her eyes alone. Farren, meanwhile, carries the trauma of the film like a weighted blanket he can’t throw off.
You won’t want to watch Chained again. But you’ll think about it. Days later, in the cereal aisle or when you hear the clink of a chain leash in the park, it’ll come back to you. It lingers. Like trauma. Or Vincent D’Onofrio’s voice. So no, it’s not horror. It’s something worse. It’s unforgettable.
