She's Gone

Ray Winstone as Harry Sands

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Labyrinthine psychological drama starring Ray Winstone. When businessman Harry Sands's daughter vanishes during a gap year in Istanbul, his investigation into her disappearance reveals a web of deceit.

Olivia is an attractive teenager who says her farewells to her family as she prepares to head off to Turkey to do charity work. Almost immediately she vanishes, apparently into thin air.

Her distraught dad Harry (Ray Winstone, whose company Size Nine, also produced She's Gone) immediately heads to Istanbul to try to find her. It's a difficult search, blocked by officialdom and Harry's own bull-headed way of going about things. He soon makes some unpleasant discoveries about his pure and perfect daughter that pitch him into alien worlds where his straight-to-the-point manner cuts no ice whatsoever.

She's Gone is a surprisingly downbeat film, effectively filmed in a naturalistic style. But it suffers from a lack of tension and trying to pack in as many plot developments as humanly possible, so the whole thing ends up feeling rushed.

But Winstone is never less than compelling as he wrestles with the fact that his daughter, and his carefully constructed life, are not what he thought they were.

(review by Alison Graham, TV Editor, from Radio Times 'Choices' 19 September 2004)

While he doesn’t shout about it, or even admit it, Ray Winstone might be one of the most important actors we have in Britain today. Not necessarily the best, but someone who still seems in touch with street-level, grey-UK feelings: the ordinary pain, ordinary laughs, ordinary violence, ordinary confusion. There are those who say he simply plays the same role over and over – which used to be a definition of stardom in Hollywood – but, if there is truth in that, in the last few years alone he has managed to do it in movies as fine and far apart in mood and manner as Nil By Mouth, Sexy Beast, Last Orders and Ripley’s Game, and never seemed less than 100% honest in each.

Damien Love, Sunday Herald, 19 September 2004

If read straight from the page the edgy dialogue might have run to a mere 20 minutes. But, thanks to Winstone, the interposed silences, the scratching, the long sighs and the seer-like gazes eked out the palaver to almost two hours. This should have spelt tedium. Instead it became a masterclass in television acting. The script was so tight the words, when they came, seemed clenched and loaded. Only the narrative could have been shorn with no loss of effect. And the acting all round was top-drawer stuff.

The Scotsman, 20 September 2004

The deceitful strategems and betrayal of trust were more personal in She's Gone. Ray Winstone, Britain's cuddliest gangster, played Harry, who experienced the worst nightmare of every father of teenager daughters. Harry's daughter disappears in Istanbul while working for a charity in her gap year. When he flies out to investigate he discovers a) that the charity never existed b) that she was working as a stripper c) that she is a lesbian and d) that she may have been abducted as a sex-slave by a corrupt businessman. Well, Istanbul is built on the remains of Byzantium, so a plot of Byzantine complications was only to be expected. What made this slightly ponderous story compelling, though, was the way it explored the power-relations and uncomfortable sexual ambiguities that can lie beneath the surface of father-daughter relationships. By turns aggressive, frustrated, tactless and terribly hurt, Winstone captured this brilliantly. It was a walk in deep, dark woods, where no spin-doctor can protect you.

The Times, Paul Hoggart, 20 September 2004