NOW ON VOD! Writer-director Joshua Nelson’s Once Upon A Crime, not by confused with Eugene Levy’s 1991 comedy of the same name, tells not one but multiple tales of excruciating evil both physical and psychological. In each segment, the fate of an innocent girl hangs in the balance, awaiting payment of a ransom to save her life and secure her freedom. It is a bit like Twilight Zone: The Movie, though with less baggage.
Isabelle Rayne plays our unnamed hostage, sitting tied and frightened as her captor (Vincent Caprio), struts unfazed by her cries of distress. He calmly informs the girl that he will release her, unharmed, when her father coughs up the money. Eyeing his ticket to the bug bucks, our kidnapper creepily informs his hostage that she reminds him of his daughter, and when she was young, he would tell her stories. Eerily, he offers to tell the girl a collection of his dark fables to pass the time. This is when the film shifts into a kind of horrific version of Jim Henson’s The Storyteller, with each tale sharing themes of manipulation with diabolical and even deadly intent.
The first tale of Once Upon A Crime is similarly a story of an abduction. The switch is that they have returned the hostage to her family and loved ones. But she’s different, changed, possibly brainwashed by her kidnappers into believing the people who have liberated her never cared about her in the first place, and they “love bombed” her. Showering her with praise and passion, but secretly wishing she never existed. Over seven days, they try to lead her back to remembering how much those around her love and care for her. But those around here aren’t exactly who they seem.
“…the fate of an innocent girl hangs in the balance, awaiting payment of a ransom to save her life…”
The second story delves deeper into the manipulative side of things, as we follow a pair of mountebanks who fleece desperately sick people out of their money with the promise of taking all of their pain and illness away. Each time, as soon as the cash or the money transfer occurs, they go into their act, and soon the con is done. But, one night whilst they are at home counting the cash they’ve harvested from the rubes, an angel appears to them both, warning that the punishment of heaven shall be upon them if in passing of twenty-four hours they cannot receive forgiveness from a person they ripped off.
The final segment in Once Upon A Crime goes a little Nightmare on Elm Street. The third fable tells the story of three women who were raped by a sadistic loner who has long since died. They form a type of support group, as they each sense something malevolent is shrouding them, and they have strange dreams of a female victim warning of danger around them. The women sense their former torturer, banding together and laying all doubts aside, heeding the warning of ghosts and at last confronting and driving out the demon that stole their innocence.
Once Upon A Crime is a deep and absorbing study into the minds of evil people and those who become their prey. The picture’s central thread combines as many twists and curves as the stories within the story, with recurring messages and players, with different faces and purposes, yet still either the hunter or the hunted in this, an absorbing distillation of the horrors we human beings are capable of.
"…an absorbing distillation of the horrors we human beings are capable of."
