When they met in that snowy place and the dad got shot, what was Cass trying to tell her by talking about tricks and gimmicks? Was she just remembering their last conversation or was there a hidden message?
shareShe was telling him that he should pay attention to Albert (without mentioning him or skating). Then she got the abductors to go to Albert for the trophy.
shareCould they hear what she was saying when she was talking to her Dad? She didn't appear to be bugged and Mika was hiding nearby with a tranquiliser gun so he wasn't listening in?
Why couldn't she just say "im going to send them to Albert, get the police to keep him under surveillance ok".
I liked this movie's edginess and atmosphere, but it had so many WTF moments it nearly ruined it.
don't call me shirley
She was definitely bugged. The kidnapper tild her she would be, and that's why she had to talk in code like that.
shareShe was also babbling about keeping a promise. Dad didn't seem to understand what she was saying and frankly neither did I.🐭
shareIt took me twice to figure it out.
She is telling her Dad to go pay attention to the skater, but because the pedophile was listening to her every word, she had to give her Dad clues. Subtly.
Her plan is to get the pedophile to talk to the Skater to get more 'stories', (there is a scene where she sets him up to do so), and meanwhile she gets her dad to go talk to the Skater. Therefore perhaps pops will ask the Skater the right questions, and be able to follow the bread crumb trail to the pedophile. Or, in the convenient case of this movie, Pops walks in to the rink as pedophile side-kick woman is speaking to the skater. Get it?
You can actually see the moment where Cass conceptualizes this plan. It's when she is on her bed, writing, and she repeats the gimmick line with a smile on her face.
On the day of her abduction, as we saw near the beginning of the film, Albert and Cass make a "pinky promise" to each other that they will never skate with anyone else. So when Cass meets her Dad eight years later, she urges him to check whether the promise was kept. At first he doesn't understand what promise she means but then he gets it.
There was an earlier scene where Cass, in captivity, remembers the little conversation she had about "gimmick" being the right word not "trick", and that's when she hatches the plan of using those terms to communicate to her father that he should go talk to Albert. The other part of her plan is, she will ask her captor to seek information about Albert at the same time, so that hopefully this will expose the captor allowing Cass to be rescued.
Of course, this is a big hail mary, it seems it would have a very low likelihood of success, it's not as if her father would be monitoring Albert 24/7. It just was a stroke of luck that the plan worked as intended: Dad was at the rink at the very moment that the suspicious "journalist" was there asking creepy questions.