Search - Dungeon Girl on DVD

Another bad one from Lommel

NoWireHangers | Sweden | 06/13/2008

(1 out of 5 stars)

"This supposed horror movie tries to be an artsy psychological horror drama but fails miserably. It's about a young woman who has been abandoned by everyone and is now held in a basement by some man. That's all plot there is except for some flashback sequences of her childhood. The movie relies heavily one first person narration and the pace is extremely slow and nothing much happens in the movie. The sound and picturequality is as bad as Lommel's other recent movies, that is about as cheap as it gets. The soundtrack combines random noises and annoying piano music.

Dungeon Girl doesn't work as a drama nor as a horror movie. It's just plain bad and doesn't deserve your time or money."

Excellent, Thought-Provoking, Unexpected Film

Curmudgeon99 | Manhattan, NY | 05/23/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Though it was not what I expected, this movie was extremely effective
in my mind. The story was full of understated sexual tension. Also, in
several aspects it worked against type. You would expect that a girl
who had been abducted would hate her abductor but in this case I found
it fascinating how she in fact liked him and needed him. It was the
Stockholm Syndrome of course but the way the two main characters just
often engaged in a staring match was curiously effective (unless you
have the attention span of a gnat) if you paid attention. The
entire relationship between the captor and captive was fascinating. It
did not follow type. It presented complex characters.

The most salient point is that the man does NOT rape the girl. Though
he clearly is heavily sexed and a total wanker, he never apparently
touches the girl. (The original for this movie, Natascha Kampusch, was
raped.)

"Dungeon Girl" does in the end have some elements of repetition that
don't seem effective but they can easily be ignored if the viewer is
unbiased."

A Very Psychological Movie

Artist & Author | Near Mt. Baker, WA | 11/18/2008

(4 out of 5 stars)

"To appreciate this movie, one has to have a fairly good working knowledge of how the human mind works. Nearly the whole movie is narrated by the 'Dungeon Girl' because the real story doesn't take place at a remote farm, but in her mind. Many reviewers have failed to realize that this is really a story about the psychology of why a young girl, kidnapped and held by a mysterious man, would stay with him for so long when she seemed to have ample opportunity to escape. In a nutshell, she was a girl from a family where she was more of an inconvenience or bother than a loved member of the family. So, when she is kidnapped, she senses that this is a man who wants her for herself - he doesn't touch her sexually - and for the first time in her life she felt appreciated, if not loved.

My one complaint about the movie, moving it down one star, is that we are not made privy to the kidnapper psychological motive for kidnapping the girl. He probably felt inadequate with adult women, in a sense still being a psychologically a young boy. It is very difficult to depict the human mind in a visual medium like a movie, but the director does a very good job of it by using various movie techniques that many might find unusual. If you don't understand the human mind, this movie might be over your head. If you do, it is a great chance to put what you think you know to use trying to make sense of the story."