Crushed review – Steve Oram is priestly lead in harrowing Bangkok-set child-abduction thriller

‘He’s American, a little bit overweight, sweaty, a little bit camp, creepy.” As far as descriptions of border-hopping paedophiles go, this seems a little on the nose. So it’s not surprising when the man who was enquiring, priest Father Daniel (Steve Oram), responds: “Are you making this up?” Featuring a seedy child-abduction situation in Bangkok, Simon Rumley’s thriller comes close at times to bugged-out exploitation flick territory – but lets its fleet and fresh manner carry it towards a Paul Schrader-esque moral calvary.

Pastor to a mixed Anglo-Thai congregation, Father Daniel has a young daughter, Olivia (Margaux Dietrich), with wife May (Nattapohn Rawddon). At a sleepover, Olivia is traumatised when her friend’s older brother shows her a “crush” video of a kitten being stomped by a scantily clad floozy. So when her own cat Missy goes awol, she is convinced the same lady is responsible, and asks her dad how God could let it happen. The family mobilise to track down Missy, but Olivia in turn disappears one day after school, kicking off Father Daniel’s own test of faith.

There could have been a very different version of Crushed, if Liam Neeson had signed on with his special set of ecumenical skills. But Rumley holds the vengeance angle at bay, subtly foreshadowing Olivia’s ordeal with the implied horror of the squashed furballs filtering through her nightmares, and using clever juxtaposition to slyly compare and contrast her father’s lofty ideals with the surrounding scrappy reality. At one point, after refusing to play the Beatles’ profane songs, Father Daniel’s acoustic guitar version of All Creatures Great and Small soundtracks Olivia’s pet search on the streets.

The film’s almost new-wave alertness lifts it above lurid payback fodder, but its inquiry into the feasibility of forgiveness wavers. While Rumley has an understandable tendency to euphemistically cut away from hotel-room horrors, it also gives the impression that these are disposable plot points rather than unbearably squalid confrontations with spiritual nihilism. When Father Daniel and May separately interrogate the paedophile’s South African fixer, Rumley’s use of split screen again makes the inquest seem superficial.

In fact, the fixer – an increasingly harrowing performance from Christian Ferreira – undergoes more of a moral crucifixion than Oram’s Daniel, whose complacent mildness makes him something closer to a satirical stooge. But if the clergyman finally goes all the way when the film itself can’t quite, Rumley’s limber style keeps things consistently interesting.