Crushed review: Steve Oram leads a harrowing Bangkok abduction thriller

Steve Oram plays Father Daniel, an Anglican priest hunting for his abducted daughter in Bangkok, in Simon Rumley's thriller Crushed — a film that comes close to exploitation territory before steering toward what our source calls a "Paul Schrader-esque moral calvary".

Father Daniel pastors a mixed Anglo-Thai congregation. He has a young daughter, Olivia (Margaux Dietrich), with his wife May (Nattapohn Rawddon). The film's plot turns on a chain of events that begins with a sleepover: Olivia is traumatised when her friend's older brother shows her a "crush" video — a kitten stomped to death by a scantily clad woman.

When Olivia's own cat Missy goes missing, she becomes convinced the same woman is responsible. She asks her father how God could allow it. The family mobilises to find Missy, but then Olivia herself disappears one day after school. From there, Crushed becomes Father Daniel's test of faith.

The film's seamy underside surfaces early. One character describes a suspected border-hopping paedophile in blunt terms: "He's American, a little bit overweight, sweaty, a little bit camp, creepy." The description is so on the nose that Father Daniel replies: "Are you making this up?"

That exchange sets the tone for a thriller that repeatedly risks tipping into bugged-out exploitation-flick territory. What holds it back, according to the source, is its handling: a "fleet and fresh manner" that carries the material toward weightier moral and spiritual terrain — an inquiry into spiritual nihilism in the Schrader mould, where a man of the cloth confronts the silence of God through violence and loss.

Oram, best known for comedic work, takes the priestly lead straight. The casting gives the film an odd charge: a performer associated with unease and absurdity now anchoring a story about a father whose faith collapses under the worst imaginable pressure.

The Bangkok setting is not incidental. The child-abduction scenario places Father Daniel in a city where his search leads him through districts frequented by foreign sex tourists, and the film's depiction of the paedophile subculture — however heavy-handed its character sketches — grounds Daniel's crisis in a recognisably sordid reality.

Whether Crushed fully reconciles its exploitation impulses with its spiritual ambitions remains the question the full review takes up. For now, the film stands as another entry in the recent run of thrillers about clergymen in crisis, with Oram's Father Daniel joining a lineage that stretches back through Schrader's own screenplays.