The same serial killer that kidnapped you and threw you down a 30-foot deep hole in the forest a year ago has now taken your sister. What do you do? Most people would curl up into a ball and quietly whimper — but not Amanda Seyfried.  She’s hunting down that freaking madman.

The aforementioned scenario is the plot of ‘Gone’, released Feb. 24 and starring Amanda Seyfried as Jill, a young woman whose sister has been kidnapped. It marks the American debut of Brazilian director Heitor Dhalia. While the film is exciting enough for the average teenager, logical disconnects and untied loose ends will leave the majority of theater goers scratching their scalps as they leave.

The film, while maybe not putting you on the edge of your seat, will at least leave you engaged throughout.  Dhalia is good at making every person Jill meets a possible sex fiend, from the owner of a locksmith business to an investigative police officer who appears throughout the movie, but serves to do nothing more than distract the viewer’s attention away from the real criminal. In addition, the film’s dark lighting serves to heighten the tension and create suspense out of even innocuous situations.

However, the factors causing the adrenaline are left largely unexplained. We are led to believe the killer has entered her house without a sign of forced entry, and are never told how he has pulled this off. Also, while Jill drives through a forest, the killer tells Jill the story of a father and daughter who lived happily in the forest on the phone. He cuts off the story saying “there’s no service here,” and ends the call, but how was he talking to her in the first place? Was he lying when he said there was no connection, or is the killer just a good ventriloquist with a microphone? The world may never know.

A scene near the end of the movie, wherein Jill slowly journeys deep into a dark forest, guided on the phone by her would-be-killer, is especially spine-tingling.  Every time he tells her to get out of the car to move a chain or walk down a path, we half expect him to jump out of nowhere. Jill’s path into the forest is like the slow upward crawl of a theme-park roller coast before a huge dive, only in this film, the dive is only 2 minutes long and is comically disappointing. Without giving anything away, it suffices to say that the kidnapper forgets that bullets are more effective than Paleolithic weapons.

The movie accomplishes what it set out to do: thrill. Despite this, obvious shortcuts and plot-holes cause this movie to fall short. Oh well. What can you expect from a movie with a serial killer?