Our job is not to look away.
There's a scene about 20 minutes into Atom Egoyan's The Captive -- just before the abduction that kicks its plot into motion -- where a father and his pre-teen daughter discuss the difference between a trick and a gimmick. On the subject of the different-colored ice skates the daughter and her skating partner wear, he says, "It's like a trick you don't need." She giggles and replies that what he's talking about is a gimmick. "That's the proper word." It's also one that could be applied to the jumbled-chronology thing Egoyan's been doing with varying degrees of success for the past two decades. What worked like gangbusters in Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter, though, can begin to look like a crutch when applied to a story that could have been told just as effectively in a more linear fashion.
The story of The Captive, which Egoyan fleshed out with co-writer David Fraser (previously a story consultant on Ararat), concerns the eight-year search for a missing girl and the toll it takes on the people involved. That includes distraught parents Matthew and Tina Lane (Ryan Reynolds and Mireille Enos), determined police detectives Nicole Dunlap and Jeffrey Cornwall (Rosario Dawson and Scott Speedman), and the victim herself, Cassandra (played by Peyton Kennedy as a girl and Alexia Fast as a teenager). How they all relate to each other takes time to suss out, though, since -- to give but one example -- Egoyan and Fraser introduce Jeffrey while he's investigating what appears to be an unrelated disappearance before jumping back in time to the moment when he joins Nicole's pedophilia task force.
In many ways, Jeffrey is the key figure in the film since it's his antagonistic attitude toward Matthew that drives the wronged man to conduct his own investigation. (We also see how Jeffrey interrogates a society couple played by Bruce Greenwood and Arsinée Khanjian, so it's abundantly clear that he doesn't treat anybody with kid gloves.) The most enigmatic, though, is Cass's captor (Kevin Durand), whose identity is known to the viewer from the start and who has a way of popping up in some unexpected places. Considering how many people's lives he's disrupted with his activities, it's rather telling that one of this film's working titles was Captives.