Be warned, Set Me Free is a wrenching watch. It's a story so abhorrent and seemingly hopeless that there may be times you don't want it to go on, but within its tight confines Kris Smith, with a script by Max Rudd and Laura Belcher, finds warmth and hope. It is, against all odds, uplifting.
Lauren (Nina Taylor) live in a lighthouse, owned by the people she claims to be her parents. To Lauren this is the entire world, where objects - Table, Rug, Wardrobe - are the only one of their kind but it's also her prison, a cell in which she's been kept for twenty years since she was kidnapped at the age of 1 by weird couple Graham and Marie Howard (Steve Carrell & Kim Waters). The brilliance of Kris Smith's creation is making us see these two worlds as one, Lauren's magic and horror, like oil and water, emulsifying into a twisted truth that helps both keep a grip on sanity. Smith's direction is astonishing, not just because he constantly finds new ways of claustrophobia, keeping the viewer trapped in there but surprising us all the time, but for the performances he wrings from his cast. Nina Taylor is so raw as to verge on unwatchable, the pain she conveys just too upsetting to sit with. A lot of the credit for that has to go to Smith. Set Me Free drags you further into darkness in the journey to find some distant light. It's a mark of how well Smith has told his story that by the end, which takes you to places once unimaginable, you'll likely be willing to go through it all again.