Chained (2012)

Chained is a film by Jennifer Lynch, shot in Canada. In the description made by the TV announcer I was led to believe it would be a film with an unpleasant subject handled in an exploitative way, like the Eli Roth SAW films. However, I would compare this more to Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.
Chained is the story of a young 9 year boy who is abducted with his mother by a serial killer who drives a yellow cab. At the start of the film we see the boys mother on the phone to her husband and he wants them to take a cab instead of the bus home for safety and security reasons.
The cab driver misses their intersection and the boy's mother starts to freak out understandably. A little bit unbelievably she can't get coverage on her phone to alert someone. She starts screaming and panicking and the driver pulls over and when he opens the door he is able to over-power her and punches her in the face knocking her out.
He pulls at his home (somewhere that has a lot of open land around it) and enters the garage. He drags the mother out of the car and leaves the boy. We hear her screams and see the boys terrified and frightened reaction. When he returns to the boy, the boy asks for his mummy and is told she is gone and is never coming back. He asks if the boy has a name and calls him Rabbit. He also says he expects no sound from the boy and the boy to wash and clean the house and eat only what is left over from the man's plate. The boy is left alone and tries to escape but the man is outside, the boy is knocked unconscious and when he wakes finds he has a shackled ankle inside the house.
The man brings girls home and rapes then kills them. The boy has to clean up the room afterwards and bury the bodies in the cellar of the house. We don't see much as the viewer but we're not left with any doubt about what happens. Identity cards of lots of girls are kept in a box and the man wants Rabbit to cut out the news stories of missing girls from the newspaper and stick them in a scrapbook.
As I said, the subject matter is dark. The boy becomes a teenager, still held in captivity. We see the man have some nightmares. His father was abusive. We also hear him describe all women as whores and sluts. He holds women in contempt. We see him as a cab driver one day when an older man and his son get in the cab, whatever has happened we don't know but the man is verbally unpleasant to his son. This brings back the memories for the man.
Later in the film, he wants Rabbit to choose a victim from a school yearbook. He tells the boy his view of the world will be different once he loses his virginity. He also gives the boy books to study, they are about the human body. Rabbit doesn't want to pick a girl from the book but is eventually forced to.
I won't spoil the rest of the film, there is a good twist to the story at the end. It didn't end in quite the way I thought it would.

I was expecting an unpleasant film that I would never want to watch again but instead I thought it was an interesting and unusual take on the subject of serial killers. It didn't feel exploitative while watching. I could recommend this film, it's not a horror film per se and I'd say was more of a psychological thriller. The acting is pretty good too.