Almost the whole film has a strong impression that this is one of the trivial variations of “Silence of the Lambs”, besides pretty annoying and exhausted. Although even for such a comparison, the facts are not enough. For example, the degree of tension in the story of a psychopath abducting and imprisoning people can be set with the help of an image of the “strange” psychological connection of the criminal and the detective, who, with the help of implicit, indirect clues, eventually encounters the correct answer. There is nothing like this in this film, the weakness of psychologicalism is generally the main weakness of the tape, despite the declared genre of the thriller.
Nevertheless, the finale of the film very strongly shifts the accents that seem to have already been precisely placed at the perception. The fact is that almost always spoiling the impression of ease in revealing the figure of the criminal here turns out to be an unexpected side: it turns out that we were on the wrong trail, and this film is not about the expressiveness of human deviations, but about the collective psychology of the “society of the spectacle”, about the desire for the so-called “fifteen minutes of fame”, the desire at all costs to be in the center of informational attention. And the last minutes of the film prove this very interestingly when the focus of the protagonist seems to succeed and fail at the same time. Thus, there is a metaphorical detachment from the plot, which gives rise to obvious doubts about the possibility of clear ethical conclusions in the situation when the television camera is real or in your imagination aimed at you and it is extremely difficult to say where the criminal is here and where the victim of circumstances.
However, a more or less successful finale does not atone for the weakness of the suspense component, without which the thriller simply cannot be good. Probably, the main reason for this was the weakness of directing: the material of a small story by Ammaniti artificially adapts to the full-length format, which leads to sagging even storylines, but weakens the very spring of action.