User reviews

Certainly an incredible and harrowing story, but this short documentary detailing Natascha's abduction has no substance. There's no purpose. The people interviewed are relevant and include Natascha herself, but the re-enactments hardly tell the story, and theres no natural flow to the documentary. Could have been done much better.

It feels incredibly awkward to be criticizing a documentary about a kidnapped child who manages to escape, but this documentary is just so badly done and terribly produced, it almost does a disservice to the story its meant to tell.



It is extremely low budget, to start. Aside from the low quality production and music choices that seem to be a string of unrelated tones from a free audiobank, they make some inexplicable decisions that somehow manage to contribute almost nothing.

The majority of the documentary is centered on Natascha herself, telling the story. Unfortunately, what ever questions the documentary people are asking her are largely inane, unimportant, or incoherent. As a result, Natascha spends a lot of time talking about basic details of her torment, such as the technical details of getting in and out of her cell, and almost no time talking about the actual unfolding events or what exactly she did to survive. If they asked her anything about her own state of mind at various points in her captivity, they largely cut all the information out and stopped largely at just "she was hungry a lot and also scared" and almost nothing more.

The story she tells basically amounts to her being kidnapped, locked in a cell, harassed and tormented over cleanliness, working in the house, getting to go outside once, then escaping. Virtually everything else, even the escape and the aftermath, is treated as an afterthought.

Inexplicably, the documentary starts out seeming to set up a follow-along with the police investigation, including typical dramatic re-enactments of police detectives doing typical police work. Then, inexplicably, they just stop showing these altogether, after getting so far as "they followed up on an incredibly vague lead and filed it away". Following that, nothing else is dramatized or re-created.

On top of that, barely any actual news footage is used either, so the vast majority of what we're watching consists either of Natascha herself speaking, or long, droning pans across objects and rooms meant to resemble the house she was kept in. Yet absolutely no detail is given of anything beyond the hidden door to her basement cell so all this imagery is functionally worthless.

This is, sadly, a case of a kidnapped child in which you get far more information and insight and even the emotional experience from reading the Wikipedia article

This might work for someone who's followed the news and knows everything about her case from the media; if you are not acquainted with the case the documentary is bewilderingly unhelpful. A pity that the girl's story was wasted between shots of faucets and sounds of dripping water.