THE STORY – Criminal defense lawyer Sam is kidnapped with Paul, the former client she defended against rape charges a decade ago. Stranded on a remote Canadian island, they struggle to survive as Paul’s behavior grows toxic.
THE CAST – Pascale Bussières, François Arnaud, Peter Outerbridge & Michael Greyeyes
THE TEAM – Wiebke von Carolsfeld (Director/Writer) & Doug Taylor (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 96 Minutes
“Someone’s Daughter,” which premiered at the Fantasia International Film Festival, opens in a state of unease that never lets up. An overwhelming score bleeds into blurred visuals: trees passing a car window, coming into focus as the car slows. A woman wakes up with tape over her mouth. We see through her eyes, those of someone drugged and kidnapped. When an older man at the wheel finally peels the tape away, she asks what this is. We wonder the same. She recognizes him, bolts, and gets only as far as the nearest wall of trees before the drugs pull her back under.
The man is Borden (Peter Outerbridge), a grieving father. His daughter Lydia died of an overdose, and he blames the woman in his car, a lawyer named Sam (Pascale Bussières), for it. Specifically, he blames her cross-examination: how she tore his daughter apart on the stand, questioned her worth and memory until nothing was left to defend. Sam doesn’t deny it was rough. That’s the job. But the film’s title does real work here: “someone’s daughter” is how we talk about victims once they become case files, a way of acknowledgment while not fully restoring the person. Lydia was a victim of sexual violence, and Sam’s job wasn’t to believe the victim. That tension between what the work requires and what it costs is the film’s most interesting idea, and it’s smart to plant it in the first scene, with the father reminding Sam that she, too, is someone’s daughter.
Borden abandons Pascale, leaving her alone in the woods to take shelter in a cabin. There, she finds Paul (François Arnaud) already inside. Paul is the man Lydia accused, the man Sam defended, the man the father blames for the chain of ruin. Now, they must survive the woods together, survive each other, and reckon, or refuse to reckon, with what happened at trial 15 years ago. It’s a clever structural move: their punishment isn’t violence but forced proximity. The revenge has made the two people who wrecked Lydia’s life sit with each other and try not to die.
The isolation of the film’s setting does what it’s supposed to: strips these two down to how they behave under pressure, not how they want to be seen. Paul picks up a gun left in the cabin, and the flicker of fear on Sam’s face shows how much she trusts him, which is not at all. The performances carry much of this, but so does the script Doug Taylor co-wrote with director Wiebke von Carolsfeld. Bussières’ impatience is instantly obvious, and Arnaud’s Paul is written with quiet entitlement; a throwaway line like “I can do whatever the fuck I want” does more character work than a monologue. The film is smart enough not to editorialize when Paul talks about his innocence; it just lets the camera sit on Sam’s face, and her skepticism does the arguing. When Paul finally asks her, point blank, whether she believed him, her answer, that it was never her job to believe him or not, is a strong moment. She cries herself to sleep after. That shows what the composure costs her.
Cinematographer Léna Mill-Reuillard deserves credit for how the woods start to feel like a third character. What begins as scenic gradually turns into menace, the tree cover reading less like shelter and more like walls closing in the longer these two are stuck together. Von Carolsfeld is clearly interested in the gap between law and justice: a courtroom can rule on a case but can’t settle what actually happened between two people in a room. The film wants us sitting in that uncertainty alongside Sam, and the setting and how it’s shot bring a suffocating feeling to that.
Then the film mostly stops cashing in on any of it. For two people trapped together with nothing to do but talk, Sam and Paul talk remarkably little about what actually binds them. Paul keeps bringing up a wolf, fear of being eaten in the night, and it’s easy to read the wolf as parts of himself he doesn’t want to face, which would be a nice touch if the film ever let him face it, even once. Instead, every time the film edges toward a real confrontation, a raw exchange, the kind survival conditions should force out of two people, it cuts away.
Sam eventually confronts him, late, and it amounts to almost nothing. Lydia, the person the story is supposedly about, ends up a footnote to her own story. The father’s rage in the opening felt specific and earned; whatever this becomes with Sam and Paul in the cabin plays more like a survival drama with a courtroom backstory, rather than a film interested in interrogating what the crime did to everyone in its orbit.
