The Film
The Betrayed stars Melissa George, Christian Campbell, Connor Christopher Levins, and Oded Fehr and is a psychological/crime drama. During the opening minutes, Melissa George’s character, Jamie, and her son Michael (Levins), are removed from the scene of a car accident and promptly taken to a remote warehouse where they are held captive.
Jamie is the protagonist, and most of the ninety-eight minute film centers around her time in captivity and her struggle to both keep herself and son alive, and figure out where $40 million in missing crime syndicate money has gone. When she first awakens in her dark and dank room, she has no idea why she is there. Alek, a masked man who talks to her quite a lot throughout, informs her that she is being held captive because of her husband Kevin’s actions.
As Jamie finds out, Kevin isn’t who he has claimed to be all these years. Instead, he has led a dark secret life and has taken $40 million from the crime syndicate that now holds her and Michael captive. All the crime syndicate wants is their money back, and they intend to get that by pressing Jamie for answers. A great deal of physical and psychological abuse ensues and they toy further with her mind by keeping her diabetic son held elsewhere, threatening to end his life if she doesn’t cooperate.
Jamie fends for herself by trying to figure out where she is and what the hell is going on. Making use of the facilities decrepit condition, she’s able to listen in on conversations through metal pipes and get a view from a small hole in the wall that she keeps hidden. The pace and impression of the film are decently suspenseful, but it grows old quickly and it becomes rather monotonous. Mixing brief flashbacks with dialogue scenes between Jamie and Alek and other scenes of more violent activity only holds up for about half of the film before you realize you’re really not all that attached to the story or the characters and that you’ve probably got better things to do.
The Betrayed on DVD
We received a review copy of The Betrayed that was not in retail packaging, but it should represent the final product. If that’s the case, it’s a unfortunate because this release has zero extra features, not even a trailer for the movie or a commentary track. There are trailers for other movies that play before you get to the main menu, but those are a nuisance, not a feature. I was rather surprised at the complete lack of extra features, but I can’t say I missed them given the film itself.
In terms of presentation quality, The Betrayed is standard fare for what you would expect for a recently produced (2008) film on DVD. I can’t say I noticed anything unusually bad or outstanding about the video quality. Certainly the atmosphere gets a little old (the small, dark room), but that’s not a technical problem. The audio does well for itself; this is a primarily dialogue driven movie, but that the levels and quality were on par is good.
Normally at this point I would look into the extra features on the disc, but The Betrayed literally has none. So with that, let’s wrap up this brief review…