Review: Held Doesn’t Fully Harness the Allegorical Power of Its Perverse Scenario

Filmmakers Travis Cluff and Chris Lofing have claimed that Held is “#MeToo inspired,” and, indeed, the film often exhibits the subtlety of a hashtag. Eager to broadly satirize male violence and entitlement, Cluff, Lofing, and screenwriter Jill Awbrey squander the potential of their perverse scenario, which suggests a blend of Donald Cammell’s Demon Seed and David Fincher’s Panic Room that’s been updated for the age of the smart home. Alluded to but ultimately out of the film’s reach is the correlation between the powerlessness that women have historically felt at the hands of destructive men and a new kind of submission that’s been ushered in by our increasingly complacent dependence on surveillance systems.

Held opens with a flashback to Emma (Awbrey) drinking inside a car. One is too aware of a theme being set up with this exhibit A of a prologue, yet the imagery, particularly a shot of one of the car’s windows sliding up and its doors locking, elegantly foreshadows what will prove to be the film’s central metaphor: locational entrapment as a mirror of social exploitation. Years later, Emma is traveling to the country, while her ride-hail vehicle’s driver, Joe (Rez Kempton), hectors her in an invasive manner. Joe is a red herring, as well as the second reminder in a row—in the span of about five minutes’ worth of running time—of how women are conditioned to be on the constant defense against male predators. Yet Cluff and Lofing utilize pregnant silences and off-kilter timing to lace their film’s preachiness with a sense of menace.

Before shaking her down for a tip, Joe drops Emma off at a home that’s shaped like a plus sign and sits, almost irrationally, in the middle of a cornfield. This isn’t a farmhouse but a luxurious modernist retreat with a sophisticated security system and various top-of-the-line doodads. Emma enjoys a swim and a few glasses of wine, until her beefy, good-looking husband, Henry (Bart Johnson), joins her later in the evening. These early scenes are among the film’s most effective because, unlike Joe and the men from the prologue, obvious signifiers of male toxicity, Henry is menacing and angry in an ineffable way that casually and convincingly suggests the resentments that build up between men and women. Soon, Emma and Henry are sprung into a nightmare in which they’re both victimized, as a masked man drugs them, re-dresses them, and plants electrodes behind their ears. From the vantage point of the house’s many cameras, the man commands them to “obey” or else.

The masked man wants Emma and Henry, who’re celebrating their anniversary but going through a rough patch, to play house in a pointedly retroactive manner that suggests brainwashing by way of a 1950s-era sitcom that celebrates the woman as the cowed homemaker and the man as the unquestioned breadwinner. Henry is to open the door for his woman, Emma is to cook dinner for her man, and so forth. And there’s a wonderful irony in this development: that these rituals take place in a modern fortress, overseen by an invader who watches from the vantage point of dozens of cameras all while nevertheless yearning for a fantasy of “simplicity” that erases decades of progressive political movements (as well as the technology he enjoys). It’s easier than ever to say that men are pigs, but it’s more difficult and original to show how modern, increasingly invisible, and therefore non-tactile technology encourages a perverse nostalgia for a bygone barbaric society. There’s also a suggestive meta twist to the film, as the masked man is played by co-director Cluff, who, like his character, contrives situations for people to playact for the hopeful amusement of others.

But the personal ramifications of having to perform a trite stereotypical relationship against one’s will and for an audience are frustratingly kept at arm’s length. Emma and Henry are thematic markers with few personality traits that don’t directly pertain to the narrative, and they, like the characters of Jordan Peele’s similarly themed, plotted, and flawed Get Out, are run through a mill of stalk-and-slash clichés that serve to dilute the film’s allegorical power. (In a few instances, the sterile, innuendo-rich tastefulness of Cluff and Lofing’s staging is outright callous, such as when a rape is tossed off as part of an exposition dump.) After a while, you may wonder what mad artists such as Brian De Palma or Paul Verhoeven might have made of the terrifying, underexplored scenario at the center of Held. For one, they may have favored drama and style over platitude, cutting to the exploitive, potentially deranged, and evocative heart of the socially nurtured fantasies that splinter men from women.