Payea and Cockerill's movie, it must be said, has a single moment that feels worthwhile and genuine; it's probably the last moment they would select as a highlight. Throughout the tape, the dominant mode of exchange between the boys and Taylor is their asking her to express her thoughts and feelings: "Was your life good?" or, "What would you change about your life?" They adopt this cloying, touchy-feely approach to such a degree that the tape starts to feel like a sociopathic version of "Jenny Jones."

You can almost feel them grasping for that kind of unfettered confrontation of certain death that capped "Blair Witch" so dramatically. Taylor never quite gives it to them. She says all the right things, more or less: She loves her mom, she'll miss her family. But it doesn't play. It's not big enough. You get the feeling that Taylor's holding back, still confused about how scared she's supposed to be. They ask what she thinks of them, her supremely evil assailants. "I really don't have much to say to you guys," she replies.

But at one point, the strategy pays off, though I wonder if the filmmakers are capable of appreciating the moment. As she's lying on the floor of the house, Taylor begs them for a favor, and you can almost feel the guys thinking they've hit pay dirt: a final request, a desperate bargain for her life, a repenting of sins, something suitably outsize. Instead, Taylor says: "Take my car back to my sister!"

"And that's it?" Payea asks, the thud of disappointment heavy in his voice. "If you had one last wish to make? It would be that your sister have her car?"

"'Cause she has kids!" Taylor insists. "And I fucking need her to have that car ..."

I think that it's safe to say that if a script of this film exists, it doesn't include anything about Taylor's sister's car. But the poignancy of the appeal, its prosaic quality, its left-field unexpectedness and its basic human generosity all serve to rupture the absurd pretensions of Payea's movie more completely than any of the tape's own amateur blundering. In a movie that loudly declares its own "reality" with every frame, Taylor's plaintive request is the only moment that actually feels real. More than anything else, Payea's dismissal, his total incredulity, suggests that he has no understanding whatsoever of what storytelling is.

Much as Payea and friends are rotten filmmakers, I don't have it in me to call them kidnappers. Kidnapping is what happened to the Lindbergh baby, and to Polly Klaas. Even if what happened to Taylor fits the technical definition, it seems to me that her case is qualitatively different from what we understand the term to mean. But it seems equally obvious that a crime has been committed, even if (as seems likely to me) Taylor was told from the outset that it was "just a movie." It is in fact just a movie, but at a certain point she seems to stop believing it is. Payea, Cockerill and friends clearly realize this, choose to ignore it, and in fact use it as the basis for the impact of their movie. I think that's criminally malicious: If they're not kidnappers, they're clearly assholes. Given that their attorneys have chosen to try the case in the court of public opinion, that may be enough to convict them.

I approached this story by accepting the premise that Payea and friends were would-be filmmakers. Now I'm not so sure. They seem more like kids wrapped up in a giant role-playing game, living out simultaneous fantasies of being serial killers and being moviemakers. But even the idlest of aspirations make demands on one's character, and this unfortunate group might do well to heed the poet Delmore Schwartz's dictum: In dreams begin responsibilities. More than ever, the dreams spawned by contemporary entertainment demand such responsibilities from all of us. If things break the wrong way for Payea and friends, they may have a long while in a lonely place to consider what those responsibilities might be.

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