Writer: Florey DM

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Watch this if you liked: “The Killing Room”, “Rope”, “The Usual Suspects”

The Good, the Bad and the Caged:

Attempting an "unscripted reality movie" for the first time ever, directors Felix Tan and Ketshvin Chee have managed to produce one of the most interesting and immersive movies to come out of Malaysia this year. The premise might be simple - a group of trapped people looking for the murderer among them - but what really absorbs the audience into the movie is the realism of it all. The actors' reactions are not scripted and are fully impromptu. The directors only assign the roles and provide the props, but the story progression all depends on how the actors themselves react to the situations presented by the directors while the cameras are continuously rolling. Not allowing any room for mistake, all reactions have to be spontaneous but still click with the storyline. Even the 500 people sitting in the hall as the spectators are giving real-life reactions to the stage-performance-gone-awry. What makes this really work is the high quality performance from the 11 key actors. What they emote on camera resonate through to watching audience and thus enabling everyone to empathize with the characters.

Editing unscripted footages, akin to editing documentaries, is never an easy job. Especially when the production was filmed simultaneously with multiple cameras such as this, but the editors and directors did a great job, even managing to whittle down the 8-hour first cut to a presentable and more easily digestible 91-minute format without losing any important detail. Though the pieced-together flashback at the end was a tad unnecessary, something that local movies are inclined to do. The exclusion of it would have made the audience process the movie more, the images not being spoon-fed and repeated to them. The musical score for the movie is gripping from the beginning to the end. With help from the Thailand side, the background music has managed to effectively add on to the intensity of each scene. The sound effects too are as real as they get. The visual effects also has to be applauded, the after effects applied in the movie is one of the best to be seen from local productions. All in all, "The Cage" is a high quality production with high quality acting, it is definitely a must-see, whether one is fan of thriller films or not.

Trivia:

Actress Yeo Yann Yann, playing Yan Ling in the movie, used her daughter's real name Wen Wen when Yan Ling had to say her last words on camera.

Best Watched With:

Anyone who enjoys an immersive thriller that exercises the mind and makes one ponder the reality of existence.

Cinema Online, 20 October 2014