Kidnap is a 2017 American action thriller directed by Luis Prieto, starring Halle Berry as Karla Dyson — a single mother in the middle of a custody battle whose six-year-old son is abducted from a park while her back is turned for a single phone call. The rest of the film is, quite literally, Karla pursuing the kidnappers' green Mustang in her red minivan across the highways of Louisiana. That is the premise. That is the structure. The film commits to it and never apologises.

What works here is Halle Berry. She is, as always, a genuinely strong actress and she brings everything she has to this role. The intensity, the panic, the desperation, the grief and the rage all read clearly through a performance that is mostly delivered from the driver's seat. Whatever the limitations of the material, she elevates the experience considerably and gives the film its emotional anchor. Take her out of this movie and there is very little left to recommend it.

What does not work — and what I struggled with throughout — is the chain of decisions made by every character in this film. Some of Karla's choices defy logic in ways that pulled me out of the experience repeatedly. The kidnappers behave with similar inconsistency. Other drivers on the highway demonstrate a complete absence of basic survival instincts as a multi-vehicle pursuit barrels through their day. Watching the film, I made some version of the same face roughly every fifteen minutes — the "why on earth are you doing that?" face. There are a lot of those faces.

I want to be honest about a potential blind spot here. I am not a parent. There may genuinely be a layer of maternal logic operating in this film that I simply cannot access from outside it. Several reviewers and parents have noted that Karla behaves the way they imagine they would in the same situation, and I have to take that at face value. So a portion of my frustration is, in fairness, probably a me problem.

That acknowledged — the film knows exactly what it is. It is a lean, eighty-minute thriller that commits hard to a simple premise and relies almost entirely on its lead to carry the emotional weight. As a popcorn watch with your brain firmly switched off, it works. It just doesn't bear up to closer scrutiny.