It is quite easy to pass Octane by as a genre film on the video shelves – the title is something that might seem more appropriate to an action film than the psycho-thriller it is. Adams certainly gives the film an eerie promise at the outset. He opens with an intriguingly disorienting shot on a man’s face as blood drips down into his eye, only for the camera to then turn upside down and reveal that the man is caught inside a crashed car. The next few scenes present a coolly alienating view of the American highway as Madeleine Stowe and daughter casually pass the crash scene with cops ominously staring at them, visit diners filled with sinister figures, rednecks and the annoyingly intrusive presence of motivational speakers on tv. It’s almost certainly the vision of the American Midwest that a foreigner might glean. And with the scene where the daughter suddenly vanishes and the mother is left looking around a truckstop diner trying to find clues as to where she has gone, the film promisingly looks as though is heading in the direction of the classic Dutch psycho-thriller The Vanishing (1988). There’s a quite reasonable suspense sequence shortly after with Stowe climbing into an RV through the roof hatch, searching for her daughter, and left trying to escape through a narrow window as the owners of the vehicle return while at the same time trying indicate to the little girl in the car parked opposite to not give her away. Subsequent scenes where Stowe cannot be sure if the cop is on her side, the abrupt surprise return of the hippie chick and where even Stowe’s ex-husband appears to be involved in the conspiracy, attain an effectively paranoid uncertainty.

On the other hand, the film also collapses into abject pretension. The images of the abducted Mischa Barton’s corruption are so clichéd as to verge on laughable – she is characterized as going through a teen rebellion phase, suddenly takes to wearing black eyeliner the moment she is corrupted, and it all comes at the hands of a sexually magnetic cult leader. A scene with three of them dancing in jumpsuits and taking drugs as images intercut from videogames and of cars crashing and loud music plays on the soundtrack has a ridiculously clichéd tameness that is really quite laughable. And the point that the whole film collapses into complete ludicrousness is the scene where we finally meet the orgiastic cult who for no discernible reason decide to hold their activities in the middle of a factory and we come to the entirely laughable image of cult leader Jonathan Rhys-Davies trying to seduce Barton into biting razors while cavorting in the back of an open-top convertible that has been parked in the middle of a wind tunnel. There is really no credibility established to the cult. It is, for example, not at all clear how Rhys-Davies knows about Stowe’s abortion or why they conduct such elaborate disguises throughout. Or for that matter what they are doing holding orgies in the middle of a factory and a wind tunnel. There is a silly passover ending where Stowe and Barton stop at a gas station on the way home, a dark mirror-windowed car pulls up, Stowe thinks Barton has gone missing again, but it turns out that she hasn’t, although a razor blade has been left hanging from the car’s rearview mirror while she wasn’t looking.