'. . . But she wasn't a killer.' (Spoilers!)

(Spoilers follow; see the film before reading further.)

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If Beth's biological mother wasn't a killer, then how did she get to be fifth in line and survive the contest, esp. after first being told what she needed to do?

I suspect the reason the film was set in the past was to get around the obvious: Nowadays, instead of killing other women to learn which was her baby, Beth would escape, call the authorities and have DNA testing done.

So far as I could tell, getting around obvious logical challenges was the only reason for the flick to be set in the 70s. It wasn't as if any character's style or line of work or past needed to be set in that era when the site of the drama is essentially faceless and timeless. I kept waiting for a detail -- any detail -- about the main character to be rooted in that time. None of the details of her past tell you anything about her -- in terms of personal history, the supporting characters are more carefully fleshed out than she.

For that matter, what's with the info dump at the end? The owner of a slaughterhouse doesn't tell a cow the entire history of the establishment before putting the animal down personally.

And "evolution's a bitch" -- why would a film that began with stilted but conceptually realistic dialogue deteriorate into hasty rote speeches from the foster snuff matriarch and blockbuster zingers during the final tough-off -- one liners that belong in a Die-Hard sequel? Besides which, "evolution's a bitch" is over-written because no one's said anything about evolution. They were talking about Beth's immediate ancestry, not the origin of the species.

I enjoyed the utter corn of having the idiot son recite interpolated lines at the end. The entire bit was like a scene from an absurdist play from the 1920s appropriated by a 50s horror film. Strange thing is, it was unnecessary for the idiot to be there at all. Beth had the keys around her neck the entire time and could have gotten free after she came to when the other parties were still in the next room.

I also think the film relied too heavily on thoughtless maternal instinct. How is it that every abducted mother for the previous twenty years stuck around to play the game? No doubt at least one cluster of mothers would have left and called the police, placing their faith in their infants' survival in the authorities, and choosing to try to save all of the children instead of just their own (though the universal selfishness implied by the idea is amusingly cynical). The film seems to try to address that by showing that the one local cop was in on it. Thing is, he's only one policeman and the adoption facility predates him.