Don't Say a Word

Don't Say a Word is an entertaining thriller whose plot may not be the most realistic, but which works nonetheless.

Dr Nathan Conrad is a psychiatrist who is called in urgently to examine a new patient, 18-year-old Elisabeth, whose illness nobody has managed to diagnose in the ten years she has been in hospital. The next day Nathan's little daughter Jessie has been kidnapped, and he has become entangled in a sinister case centring on the mentally ill girl. Jessie's kidnappers, led by the unscrupulous Patrick Koster, give him half a day to get Elisabeth to reveal a particular number that is of extraordinarily great value.

Nathan does everything he can to win Elisabeth's trust and at the same time to get to the bottom of the secrets the withdrawn girl is hiding. Meanwhile he can feel the kidnappers breathing down his neck, and they do not want the police involved, so Nathan has to be psychiatrist and detective at the same time.

The characters are a little too black and white - Sean Bean, for example, is a villain with a capital V, and the film's portrayal of the Conrad nuclear family is sickeningly rosy - but you forget that in the heat of the moment. The sticky ending is one notch too much, however, and it is a little pathetic to see the ageing Michael Douglas paired up with the much younger Famke Janssen. But then that part of the story does have its parallel in real life.