A Mother's Courage
When her ex-husband kidnapped her children it left Rachel Harrison (Linda Hamilton - Dante's Peak) devastated and relying on specialists to try and find her husband to get her children back. But Rachel is a professional tracker and when a young girl goes missing from a nearby camp site her friends at the police department show up and ask her to lead a search, she obliges. With just the size and design of the child's shoes to go on Rachel heads out in to the scorching heat of the desert the whole time thinking back to her troubled relationship to her ex Kevin (Kevin Kilner - Home Alone 3). As the search goes on and the heat starts to take its toll on Rachel she hears back from base that whilst the specialists have found Kevin they haven't found her children. But that leaves Rachel exhausted, carrying on the search for the missing girl not knowing if her own children are okay.
"Point Last Seen" is a curious based on true events movie and in many ways it is a movie of two parts. One part is the search for the missing girl and what we get is a glimpse at the work of an expert tracker who in rough territory looks for broken twigs and shine on rocks to lead the way. We also see how other trackers not use to searching in this unforgiving terrain are not use to this method of tracking leading to tension especially as whilst Rachel mind is on the job at hand she also has to deal with her own missing children. I am not going to say how either story plays out when it comes to the missing children so if you want to know and don't know the true story that this is inspired by then you will have to watch.
But then we get the other part and we get the story of Rachel and her marriage to Kevin, a monster who abused her for the most insignificant of reasons, from a bottle not being straight to towels not hanging right. We also see how he abandoned Rachel in the desert, threatening her with a gun but we also see how despite trying to build a home for her children the law favoured her husband after he claimed Rachel had abandoned them. It is a painful story of domestic violence, the law being wrong and a strong woman who despite dealing with her own issues goes out to help another.
What this all boils down to is that "Point Last Seen" is curious because it isn't so much of an entertaining movie yet it is an enthralling one with the dual storylines both as interesting as the other.
