Healy plays Ray Moody, who runs an unsual business.
Is the daily grind getting you down? Are your vices getting the better of you? Do you feel like escaping your hectic life? Then Kidnap Solutions LLC might be for you. For just a small fee you can be swept away from it all. You’ll be tossed in the back of a van, gagged and tied up in a strange man’s basement.
That is the premise at the center of the comic thriller Take Me, which will screen at UW-Cinematheque on May 12.
Ray Moody (played by Pat Healy, who also directs) is a sad sack of a man who is eking out a living with his therapeutic kidnapping business. Fortune strikes when he gets a call from Anna St. Blair (Taylor Schilling), who is prepared to pay top dollar for a deluxe weekend package. It’s an offer he can’t refuse, but as the weekend stretches on he finds that Anna may not be what she seems.
Dolled up like an icy Hitchcock blonde, Schilling’s Anna is a wonderful enigma, constantly keeping both Ray and the audience wondering why she is taking this strange vacation. Here, Shilling demonstrates far more emotional range than she does as Piper on Orange Is the New Black, where her character must be cagey to survive in prison. Take Me’s prisoner needs her to go the opposite direction, broadly using every trick available to make it through the weekend. In the end, Anna demonstrates she is far better at control and manipulation than her captor — who is a bit too polite for the abduction biz.
Kidnapping is the only part of Ray’s life where he feels in control (and the wonderful absurdity of that is the same wonderful absurdity of this movie), so when this new project goes haywire, we have the pleasure of seeing what is beyond the end of a man’s rope. This could be painful to watch — due to the humiliation and sadistic slapstick Ray endures — but Healy makes Ray just deserving enough of what he endures. He has a funny way of sweating that makes his trials a pleasure to witness.
Mike Makowski’s script demands precision, or it wouldn’t work as the crazed chess game that it is, and Healy delivers. After two decades as an actor, this is Healy’s first time directing a feature film, but Take Me does not feel amateurish.This low-budget, small-cast movie moves swiftly through the film’s 83 minutes, a dark comedy laced with authentic sadness. Ray and Anna aren’t happy people, but I was happy to spend some time watching them play off each other.
There will be a post-film Q&A with Pat Healy moderated by Cinematheque’s director of programming, Jim Healy. If you are wondering, the two are indeed brothers.
