Rapt (2009) - film review

Successful businessman Stanislas Graff discovers the true meaning of horror when a band of thugs kidnap him and subject him to the most degrading and brutal period of captivity.  Graff refuses to crack and instead chooses to endure this barbarity with courage and dignity.  When he is finally released he faces an even greater ordeal.  Everyone seems to have found out every sordid detail of his private life...

In Rapt, director Lucas Belvaux continues his unflinching commentary on the dehumanisation in contemporary society which he began with La Raison du plus faible, but from the other end of the social spectrum.  Here, the central protagonist is not a hard-pressed worker who looks like a refugee from a Ken Loach film but a filthy rich financier and fully paid-up member of the haute bourgeoise.   Inspired by the real-life abduction of Baron Edouard-Jean Empain in 1978, the film portrays a man’s slow and humiliating descent into Hell, contrasting his brutal treatment at the hands of a group of thuggish kidnappers with the monstrous behaviour of his family and his colleagues when his embarrassing peccadillos enter the public domain via a media-led feeding frenzy.

Rapt is Belvaux’s most powerful piece of cinema to date, even bleaker and more visceral than the gritty Cavale segment of his famous Trilogie (2002).  What is perhaps most remarkable about this film is that the protagonist is not one we would ordinarily sympathise with.  Stanislas Graff is an arrogant hedonistic aristocrat who casually abuses his wealth and power for his own amusement.  Surely he deserves everything he gets?  But in the course of watching Graff’s degrading decline to the state of a virtual animal and seeing his dignity utterly wiped away we cannot help feeling pity for him and anger at the way he is being treated.  As the inhumanity of the world around him becomes more and more evident, Graff’s own humanity is revealed to us and he becomes almost a martyr, a pitiful wretch who ends up being stripped of his pride, his status, his wealth and, ultimately, his identity.    

With his exceptional flair for mixing genres (here noir-like thriller and social satire), Belvaux crafts a chilling fable for our times, one which explores the duplicity of individuals, the venality of corporate culture and the power of the media to totally destroy people’s lives. Yvan Attal’s portrayal of the central character is harrowing in its realism, a gut-wrenching tour de force that throws into sharp relief the cruelty and viciousness that exists within our society - not just in the heads of violent criminals, but also in the boardroom, the newspaper offices, even the family home.  Rapt is an intensely provocative reflection of a society that has lost both its moral compass and its soul.

Following the success of Rapt at home and abroad, the American independent film production company Smuggler Films has brought the rights to a remake.  The film, provisionally titled Abduction, is currently in pre-production and is scheduled for release in 2013.

© James Travers 2010

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