Crashing rain, a remote countryside mansion, illicit sex, a British-accented Famke Janssen holding a shotgun while riding a horse – one might easily assume that the lurid Netflix thriller Locked In is a four-wines-in blast. At times it threatens to be, usually when at least two of those aforementioned elements are in play, but it’s all tease and no payoff, the heightened silliness of the first act wearing wafer-thin by the last, charmingly farfetched turning into an annoyingly far reach.
Written by Rowan Joffe, whose adaptation of SJ Watson’s enjoyably nutty thriller Before I Go to Sleep handled a similar balance far more effectively, Locked In also feels as if it’s based on an airport-bought page-turner. There are flashbacks, a potentially unreliable narrator, shifting perspectives, a hidden diary – the same ingredients that Gillian Flynn turned into magic with Gone Girl – but it all amounts to very little here, cruelly fooling us into the expectation of something far twistier. Janssen plays Katherine, an ex-actor who has been involved in an accident that’s led to locked-in syndrome, a puzzle for an inquisitive nurse, played by Anna Friel, to figure out. Katherine’s adopted daughter Lina (Rose Williams, giving her best Alicia Vikander impression) seems to know more than she’s letting on, but who is the real victim and who is the real villain?
