A grueling hostage drama that focuses on the survivor for a change. Elizabeth Kerr reports.

Given the news that Cleveland kidnapper Ariel Castro committed suicide in prison a few days ago, it would appear3096 Daysis timelier than could have been predicted. Castro was sentenced to life plus 1,000 years for kidnapping at least three women and holding them in his basement for a decade. Lest anyone forget that Europeans also commit outrageous crimes, the film compacts the headline grabbing 8-year ordeal Austrian (now) woman Natascha Kampusch suffered at the hands of an equally unbalanced captor. Despite occasionally feeling like a made-for-television movie or a procedural series "special" two-parter (not surprising given director Sherry Hormann cut her teeth on the small screen)3096 Daysis a relatively harrowing and concise recounting of Kampusch's basement-bound adolescence.

Fastidious and obsessive unemployed mama's boy Wolfgang Priklopil (ThureLindhardt,Keep the Lights On)snatches 10-year-old Natascha (Amelia Pidgeon) off a Vienna streeton her way to school in 1998. Priklopil isn't the sweet, friendly type that lures clearly distracted kids into his van. He's aggressive and violent, and that's what defines Natascha's life for the next 8 years.Priklopil threatens her, tells her repeatedly her parents don't care about her and withholds food in order to compel her to obey him. He repeats the devastating pronouncement again and again. As time goes by and Natascha grows into an undersized and malnourished teenager (Antonia Campbell-Hughes).Priklipil continues to humiliate her regularly, compounding the abuse with regular beatings,eventually raping her once she begins to menstruate. Priklopil's casual, but intense, cruelty and gleeful abuse are never explained but they don't have to be; this is Natascha's story.

At the beginning in voiceover Natascha explains how she has told Priklopil only one of them would survive, and so, as the teenaged Natascha, Campbell-Hughes is simultaneously determined, wily and deferential in varying degrees at varying times, and does an excellent job of flitting between fear and defiance. She appears to give in toPriklopil's demands but never completely gives up her identity to him. She knows she should take her chances and run while they are at a hardware store, but wonders if his threats of gunning down anyone that gets in the way are true - and that stops her. It's not an easy job, despite the fact that we're rooting for her from the beginning andCampbell-Hughes is so painfully thin you wonder if she's going to have the strength to run.

Hormann and writer Ruth Toma, working from Kampusch's autobiography, are cagey on a lot of key issues, like whether or not Kampusch might be subject to Stockholm Syndrome. Squeezing nearly a decade of agony into a tidy 110 minutes is difficult, to say the least. There are no major events to use as touchstones the way standard biopics do, and the complex (albeit twisted) relationship Natascha and Priklopil develop could be the subject of years of examination. After demanding to go outside into the garden, she says, "You're as tied to me as I am to you," a statement loaded with multiple meanings, considering its context at that point in time. As Priklopil,Lindhardt teeters into caricature a couple of times, and he's most effective in the quiet moments that are ominous and threatening in their banality.3096 Daysis by no means a comprehensive examination of the criminal or the survivalist's mind, but it is a chilling reminder of the violence against women that can go on for years, usually unnoticed when it doesn't make headlines.

3096 Daysopens in Hong Kong September 19.

A teenaged Natascha (Antonia Campbell-Hughes) berates herself for her own inaction in the hostage drama 3096 Days

(HK Edition 09/13/2013 page7)