‘Found Alive’ Review – A Timely Yet Plodding Crime Thriller [Sitges]

To conquer trauma, we must sometimes follow it back into the dark caverns where it lives and face it head-on.

That’s the crux of Carlota Pereda’s plodding crime thriller, Found Alive. Though timely and deeply troubling, an utter lack of tension or narrative punches leaves the audience with a film on life support.

Based on a novel by Carla Norton, the story follows Reeve (Chloë Grace Moretz), a rare example of a kidnapped teen who was actually found and freed from her captor. An adult now, she seeks to rebuild her life, while still haunted by the memories of her abuser. When the police find a missing young girl, Reeve is brought in to comfort her and learn more about her kidnapper(s). But with the police unwilling to listen and no one else lifting a finger to help, she sets out to find the men responsible herself…a mission that will take her back into the lion’s den she escaped so long ago.

It hurts me to write that Found Alive struggles to find some, well, life. It really does. I caught Pereda’s Piggy during the 2022 Sundance Film Festival and immediately fell in love with the director’s work. Raw, gruesome, and deeply intimate, it struck me as one of the more profound examples of bullying in horror that I had ever seen. Found Alive delivers all of that (minus the bullying), but in such small doses that it does little to give the film the jolt it needs.

The story starts promising enough. We meet Reeve as a teenager, unconscious in the trunk of her captor’s car. She’s not rescued by the police, her parents, or even a determined best friend. Reeve is found because a drunk driver (who also turns out to be an abuser) hits her kidnapper’s car. This is where Found Alive is at its strongest. Through Moretz’s character, writers Pereda, Lori Evans Taylor, and Matt Venne express a rage at a system with a track record of failure. Though it never quite screams with the furious anger it intends to, that frustration with police who don’t do their damn job resonates throughout.

Pereda has the right idea in casting Moretz, but the script does little to utilize her properly. From the film that caught audiences’ attention, , to and the 2013 remake, Moretz has shown she’s at her best when she plays vulnerable characters given the chance to unleash something primal within them. On the vulnerability side, we’re with Reeves as she experiences unnerving flashbacks to images of her tighty-whitey-wearing abuser. We watch as, during a disquieting moment, she reveals her scars to the little girl, acquired by chains, burns, and even bite marks. Through it all, Moretz carries a quiet sadness within. But the script rarely allows her to reach her full potential or express the anger it wants us to have and that she deserves to let out.