95 min | R | September 15, 2021 | Peacock
James McAvoy plays a father who races back to the Scottish Highlands when his young son vanishes from a campsite. He improvises every line, handed no script and only the broad shape of the plot. The experiment throws off more heat than the movie wrapped around it.
Edmond Murray works abroad and misses most of his son’s life. He returns to Scotland when the boy vanishes from a Highlands campsite, and the police have no leads. McAvoy receives no script and improvises through a procedural that the rest of the production already mapped. The real subject is not the missing child. It is whether one actor can carry a thriller on instinct alone. The film bets yes and comes up short.
McAvoy plays Edmond as a man running on adrenaline and self-recrimination. His improvisation produces genuine friction. He stumbles over words, repeats his own questions, and lets panic crack his voice in ways a written scene rarely permits. Claire Foy plays Joan Richmond, the ex-wife, with a contained dread that does most of the film’s quiet work. Tom Cullen plays Frank, her new partner, and Gary Lewis plays Inspector Roy with the weary patience of a man who has run these searches before. The scripted actors give McAvoy a stable surface to push against, and the contrast exposes how much of his work is texture rather than character.
Christian Carion directs his own English-language remake of his 2017 French film Mon Garçon, working from a script he wrote with Laure Irrmann. The Highlands photography trades postcard grandeur for low gray light and wet roads, which suits a story about a man searching in the dark. Carion shoots long handheld takes to accommodate the improvisation, and the camera hangs back to give McAvoy room to find each scene. That method captures spontaneity and sacrifices precision. The editing cannot tighten what was never blocked, so the pacing sags every time the plot needs to advance. The structure leaves several threads dangling and arrives at a destination the audience reaches well ahead of Edmond.
The improvisation is a stunt, and the stunt is the most interesting thing here. Strip it away and the film is a generic abduction thriller with a capable cast and a flat investigation. The gimmick proves McAvoy can build raw emotion without a net. It does not prove that emotion adds up to a movie. Carion mistakes a process for a story and trusts intensity to fill the gaps that structure should hold. The result is a showcase for one actor bolted onto a thriller that never earns the panic at its center.