10×10 is the first feature-length film for director Suzi Ewing. Noel Clarke wrote the screenplay and it stars Kelly Reilly (Eden Lake, Britannia) and Luke Evans (mostly recently in TNT’s The Alienist). The film’s plot is simple: Lewis (Evans) stalks Cathy (Reilly), abducts her, and locks her in sound-proofed (10×10) room in his home. At first, all he asks his captive is what her name is, but as she tries to escape, he gets more violent. As 10×10 unfolds, the viewer’s assumptions about what’s going on take some dramatic turns—and one of the most effective things about this film is precisely the way it plays with viewers’ expectations.
These captured-women narratives are undoubtedly saying something about men’s anxiety in an era of diminishing power—and of the rising power of women. The 2010s kicked off with Hanna Rosin’s major article in the The Atlantic: “The End of Men,” with her book of the same title following on its heels. On the other hand, as important as that general anxiety is, the films are all saying something different in their particular kinds of captivity, the different dynamics they imagine between captor and captive. 10×10 is no exception.
Here’s the trailer:
Evans’ Lewis seems suitably malevolent through the opening act of the film: we learn nothing about him, and his menacing attitude toward Cathy (who is economically signaled in her opening scenes to be a “good” woman) is unmotivated and inexplicable. When she’s bound up like meat in the small room he prepared for her, he tells her the story of a bull in a slaughterhouse that escaped its prison and ran through town, only to be caught and butchered. Its meat though “had turned to poison. Poisoned by fear.” Viewers get the distinct sense that nothing good is in store for the virtuous heroine.
Kelly Reilly as Cathy, captured by a malevolent Lewis (Luke Evans)
The dynamic between captor and captive in 10×10 changes, though, in ways that Ewing does a good job of cluing us in to without our realizing we’re being clued in. The film becomes much more interesting as a result.
With its minimal set of characters, 10×10 rises and falls on its two leads, and Kelly Reilly and Luke Evans, both accomplished actors, make it rise. They are fantastic through all the psychological and physical challenges of their roles. The pace and timing of the film are also perfect. 10×10 is a solid, entertaining, surprising, and perfectly-acted thriller. It’s only flaw, really, is that its scope is rather limited, its range—its meaning—rather confined. In that way, its title, 10×10, is doubly apt.
Grade: B
You can stream 10×10 on Amazon:
And you can get Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men here:
