I after watching the movie i think that Keane lost his daughter at the station, that is why he was repeating events there at a similar time in the beginning of the movie as he was at the end. The whole movie was simply about understanding that it was not his fault his daughter is lost.
i know writing is half-assed right now but I'm tired so deal with it.
(spoiler warning)
After watching Kira go from the newspaper stand to where he had agreed to meet her, Keane sees how easy his daughter could have been abducted, faces that reality and says "I'm sorry" out loud.
Surely Keane, the victim of an abductor's crime, realizes how wrong it is for him to kidnap Kira from her own mother. He can't go through with it. Tearful, he returns to Kira and tells her he's going to meet her mother at a restaurant.
The exchange between Kira and him is profoundly moving.
I sort of figured that whether he had a daughter who was kidnapped or not was not really the point. In his mind he believes it and this is what we are lead to believe also.
I also believe that it was not keane's intention to kidnap kira directly. I believe he intended to place kira in the simulation to try and determine who kidnapped his own daughter by setting her up there at 4:26 so that she will be kidnapped. However he suddenly realises what he is doing and can't let it happen.
Obviously the fact of whether anyone is really waiting there at 4:26 is another matter.
Just my theory, anyone else got any ideas?
good film by the way. The awkwardness and volatility of keane made the film thoroughly gripping.
he was using kira as bait, and discovered that when she was not abducted, he was not going to find his daughter's captor. he cries when he comes to terms with this. this was not "thoroughly gripping". this was predictable, and ultimately stupid.
shareSimplistic reading ("using Kira as bait"). Keane almost certainly is mentally ill, probably paranoid schizo, but he is also intelligent and articulate, and _not_ stupid enough to think he's going to find the abductor after months in a crowded Manhattan bus station. Nothing else in his speech or manner (when he's not having an episode) indicates he's irrational or just plain dumb enough to believe this, and when he goes to get Kira, he's not in the middle of an episode.
Further, if all he was going to do was use her as bait at the station, why would he buy tickets? And why would he obviously intend to use them until right at the last moment?
There are several reasons he might have taken Kira to the station, but I think one is most likely. If you remember, he does this (leaving her alone, then observing) at least one other time in the film (at McD's), and he seems to be trying to solve the problem of how it was that his daughter (who definitely did exist, btw...this guy was unquestionably a father) could be gone, completely out of existence, when he took his eyes off her for only a few moments. Especially if you're a parent, you can see how, if you lost a child that way, it would be hard ever again to shake the feeling that the child's very existence depended on your relentlessly constant observation. Keane seems to be puzzling over how this could be true with his daughter, but with Kira, she's OK when he's not right there with her every second. He observes her as if to prove to himself that a child can exist without a parent there at every moment.
I think what happens over the course of the film is that it dawns on him eventually that the abduction--assuming there was one--was a random event, not something predictable that could be attributed in a reliable cause-and-effect relationship to his momentary lack of observation. More simply, lots of parents take their eyes off their kids all the time, and nothing happens at all. Statistically, a stranger abduction is an exceedingly rare event. But in an individual parent's life, it's either happened to you or it hasn't; it's either a hundred percent or zero percent.
I think what _really_ makes this clear is how the mother takes off and leaves her kid with Keane--who, after all, is to her only a guy she met at a hotel. I mean, think about the outrageous unfairness of it. She leaves her kid with a paranoid schizo, but the guy just happens to be well enough to function, and he was a father (and obviously a skilled and loving one). So, just out of random stupid luck (and, I guess, some "sense" the mother has--but how often has that sense been famously wrong?), Kira's OK with Keane, in fact better than OK, but she sure as hell might not have been. And Keane knows this. Further, knowing so, he might reasonably be assumed to think about how incongruous and unfair this is, when compared with his own very small lapse (by comparison) that resulted in the disappearance of his own child.
I suspect that's what is mostly behind his question "That's it?" to the mother, when she tells him they're leaving for Albany. How upset would you be to have been taken for granted by an apparently overtrusting mother, when you could have been a killer for all she knew--but she was lucky enough to have picked someone who would be a great two-day dad to her daughter? Wouldn't it cross your mind to think about how careless she was being with a child, when you'd give anything in the world to have yours back?
I don't think he was able to come to terms with this incongruity, not until he tells his daughter "I'm sorry" near the end of the film. I think he's sorry not only for his own error, but also for the randomness of a world where some people can barely pay attention to their kids at all, and yet their kids are safe, while some people are distracted for a moment and lose a child forever. It seems to me most of the film involves him trying to figure this out, like a guy trying to work a Rubik's cube, and then at the end he simply accepts it--not her disappearance, but the fact that somehow, in total, his momentary lapse plus the roulette wheel hitting at just the wrong instant conspired to allow this to happen.
when he goes to get Kira, he's not in the middle of an episode
Nailed it completely.
shareThankyaverramuch. I do remember thinking this was one of those films you haven't seen before, and a really thoughtful one. (Roger Ebert had this theory that almost all films you ever see fall into only a few basic storyline-and-technique categories, to the point where you sit there and think "Alright, this is the buddy-cop movie with the quick edits, the training montage, etc." -- just a constellation of conventions, so that the game ends up being whether Film Y does it better than Film X, but basically it's the same thing. But once in a while you see one and think, "Okay, I've never seen this film before." Stop me if you already know that, which you might.)
shareI'm dealing dude,I'm dealing
sharemy guess is that keane uses kira in the end to help him determine whether the loss of his actual daughter was his fault or not.. he repeats the exact steps (like taking the train at the exact same gate) with kira.. i was a bit puzzled by his intentions when he picked up kira at school (obviously without telling kira's mum) but then i realised he was using her to help him become kind of full circle with himself.. in the end, when he realised that nothing happened to kira when she got back to the gate he told her (and also that she was not kidnapped by anyone) he realised that it was not really his fault if he lost his daughter.. the loss of his daughter was just due to very unlucky random circumtances and he was not the one to be blamed entirely (even if he did not pay constant attention on his daughter at the port).. however even after realising this, he asked sorry to his daughter bcos he was not able to prevent her from getting lost (or abducted)...but i think the end was kind of redemptive to keane bcos in some way he was forgiven for his mistake by kira, who tells to keane that she loves him.
very interesting film...