"Our cinema has been taken hostage, it seems, by hostage movies and kidnapping dramas. But not the kind where Charles Bronson or Bruce Willis or Liam Neeson must rush in and save the day. This most recent spate of films leaves genre theatrics behind and instead uses the power dynamics of captivity as a jumping-off point for other conversations. Last year's Venice Film Festival premiered Yorgos Lanthimos's demented sci-fi-adjacent drama and Gus Van Sant's crime thriller Dead Man's Wire,"
"while at the same time the Toronto International Film Festival was premiering Romain Gavras's comic-epic Sacrifice. Earlier in 2025, Jafar Panahi's It Was Just an Accident won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. All these pictures share a premise that involves the downtrodden grabbing ahold of someone with great power - an always-compelling concept, but perhaps there's a reason they have flourished at this particular moment."
"We all know at this point that the internet and social media have failed to deliver on their promises of transparency and collapsed distance. (You can tweet at Elon Musk all you want; that's not going to stop him from trying to destroy the world.) So the image of the everyday victimized finally getting a chance to confront the supposedly untouchable masters of the universe provides a present-tense thrill that is undeniably powerful."
Recent films repurpose hostage and kidnapping scenarios to examine power imbalances and social anxieties rather than rely on genre theatrics. Filmmakers including Yorgos Lanthimos, Gus Van Sant, Romain Gavras, and Jafar Panahi stage encounters in which marginalized or victimized characters seize control and confront powerful figures. The premise resonates with contemporary disillusionment about the internet and social media's failed promises of transparency, producing a present-tense thrill when ordinary people face untouchable elites. These films vary in tone and often present captors as plausibly unstable, complicating audience sympathies while probing conspiracy culture and systemic inequality.
Read at Vulture
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