.....that the kidnap victim becomes a kidnapper herself?? So after she sneaks out to leave her house for good, she ends up in a park where she sees an unattended child and decides to kidnap her to make the child her own? She had just 'ran away' from home without a dime to her name, no drivers license/ID card, no job or place to live, yet she's planning to kidnap a child to keep as her own from thereon out?? Not to mention the fact that she knew that her own kidnapping was wrong and punishable by law, but now she wants to become a kidnapper and take a child away from her parents, as she had been herself at the same age??

If so, that proves that she was either mentally unbalanced all along, due to her own years in captivity, or she became unhinged after being rescued and returned to her true home, most likely due to the actions of her misguided mother and her father moving out, or both. Either way, it was a bizarre cliffhanger-ending that no one could've predicted or been prepared for.

Before the absurd ending, the movie was a believable study about a kidnap victim coming home after years in captivity - being her formative, developing years to boot, and how she and her parents handled it. I liked the stark realism of the no-flash, non-Hollywoodized scenes: little to no background music, washed-out colors, and realistic silent awkward pauses throughout, instead of snappy comebacks and rapid responses which so many movies consist of and not how humans actually speak.

The abstract left turn of the mother taking the desperate, forcible approach to get her daughter back in every way - not only physically but emotionally too - was not easy to watch at the same time it was almost understandable. Also understandable but hard to watch was the girl being so torn between missing her captor and wanting the life she had with him back again, and resuming the life with her parents in her actual home that she had no interest or invested emotion in whatsoever.

The acting and dialogue were exceptional, the story was realistic and compelling, but the last two minutes of the movie ruined all that to the point that I could only manage to give it 5 out of 10.

I think it was a great movie but it lacked depth. They should have dived deeper into leia's character and her life when she was kidnapped. From the surface, all the kidnapper did wrong is kidnap her, otherwise he raised her quite alright, which is how Leia/Leanne seems to see it but they don't show us enough from her captured time to support that. We're thrown into the story halfway so it's hard to divulge fully into the characters and understand them. The movie seems to lean too much on our preceding knowledge of Stockholm syndrome.

Not the ending itself, but towards the end the story feels rushed, goes against the aura the movie gave out in the first half were they put effort to delicately build the story which I thought was special. The acting was astounding though, especially by Ronan (forgotten how to spell her first name tsss) very believable, feels like it was based on a true story. The plot line isn't the best, especially the twist at the end, a little off, but Ronan really made the best the best out of it.

Although it could have been, it's not exceptional, but I still think it's a good movie.

While there was an earnest attempt on the part of the filmmakers to depict the psychological mindset of the Stockholm syndrome in a child held captive in a kidnapper's basement for years, this disturbing film raised too many questions about the plausibility of the situations depicted.

As an infant, Leanne Dargen was kidnapped in a local park by Ben McKay, who raised the child on his own. She was renamed "Leia," and the kidnapper drilled it into the child that he had "rescued" her. For years she was confined in isolation in a basement. When she finally was saved by the authorities years later, she completely identified with her captor. In short, Leia was welded to Ben.

When the young woman is returned to the custody of her birth parents, it is not surprising that the twenty-two-year-old finds it difficult to adapt. She recognizes that Ben never allowed her to do anything on her own, and she was inculcated with an apocalyptic vision leading her to believe that the old world had ended and places like Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon no longer exist.

In a traumatized, zombie-like state, Leanne should have been placed in an intensive recovery program. In the film, it made no sense that she apparently was only assigned weekly therapy sessions with the psychiatrist, Dr. Dana Andrews. It was even more implausible that with such a publicized case, the prison administration where Ben McKay was being held would permit a personal visitation with Leanne!

The major dramatic choice made by the filmmakers was in the actions of Leanne's mother Marcy to adopt the same brutal conditioning tactics as the kidnapper, locking Leanne in her room and regimenting her life like a prisoner. Marcy should have taken her daughter on trips to Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon. From Leanne's perspective, Ben was simply replaced by Marcy as her overlord.

In one of the most ghoulish moments of the film, it is revealed that allotments of water are given her daughter at specified times of the day. While Marcy had apparently read some books on the Stockholm syndrome, the books certainly would not have promoted the forced, abusive treatment of such a fragile psyche as Leanne's.

Despite the excellent performances, "Stockholm, Pennsylvania" was never credible as a case study in which the original treatment of Leanne by the kidnapper was made to seem more humane than that of the birth mother. The 5-star rating above is a generous one.