Velvicide

Writer/director Kenneth Perkins’ Velvicide is about a young woman trying to move forward after a terrifying experience, only to realize that telling her story might be just as dangerous as surviving it.

Velvet Stevens (Gea Rose Henry) is a young woman who’s survived a kidnapping and is trying to stitch her life back together in the aftermath. With her kidnapper still out there, she agrees to sit for a true-crime documentary directed by Isaac F. (JD Starnes), who wants to dig deeper into Velvet’s story, whether she’s comfortable or not.

Running alongside Velvet’s story is Callum (Jon Devlin), a suicide hotline operator taking calls from people at their breaking point. The problem is, after a recent call he took that ended in a murder-suicide, Callum is determined to make a bigger impact. That drive leads him to call Velvet for a sympathetic ear, but it’s clear he’s crossing a line.

As the documentary takes shape, Velvet begins to recount the details of her kidnapping. She’s chained to a safe in the basement of an abandoned home, and her kidnapper comes down wearing a mask made of googly eyes. He has only one goal for Velvet: to make her kill herself. One night it’s a blade, the next it’s a bottle of pills, then it’s a hangman’s noose. Each night brings a new method, but Velvet is smart enough not to let herself be persuaded or coerced into doing what he wants.

“He has only one goal for Velvet: to make her kill herself.”

In Velvicide, Kenneth Perkins walks a very thin line in his indie thriller surrounding the theme of suicide. I admire Perkins’ audacity in taking us down a very controversial road and addressing a subject few would dare to broach. As a writer, he did his research, putting us in the shoes of kidnapping victims and their emotional and psychological makeup afterward. Then there are the people who put themselves out there to help the hopeless—and the ones eager to exploit these stories for fame and social media clout.

You take all this, and Perkins still manages to build a horror/thriller movie around it. Yes, it’s a larger-than-life story with a psychopath trying to inflict as much harm to the mind and body as possible. I’m not one who believes certain topics are taboo for any genre of film. But you can’t do it just to do it, and Perkins nails it.

Also, a great performance by Gea Rose Henry as Velvet. She carries the emotional weight of most of the movie and shifts along a sliding scale of strength and vulnerability from one situation to the next. It’s complicated, forcing Henry to make emotional changes on a dime—an incredible indie performance. The rest of the cast just has fun being various versions of the film’s villains.

Writer/director Kenneth Perkins’ Velvicide takes a volatile subject and turns it into a nasty little thriller, with the kidnapping horror and its fallout always keeping the pressure on. Anchored by Gea Rose Henry’s raw, constantly shifting performance, the film sticks with you because it’s not just about surviving the basement—it’s about what happens when everyone wants a piece of your story afterward.