Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story

One thing the world is not short on is reasons to despise the North Korean government of Kim Jong Il. Nevertheless, another one is chronicled in "Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story," which tells the story of a North Korean intelligence initiative by which Japanese nationals were kidnapped and taken to Pyongyang, so that the spies could study them and master the art of masquerading as Japanese as they were dispatched to various localities to do their mischief around the world. It sounds like something out of a Robert Ludlum novel, but it's heartbreakingly true, as the documentary makes clear by looking at the phenomenon not from the top down or the outside in, but from the bottom up and the inside out.

Megumi Yokota was 13 in 1977; she was walking home from school in the coastal city of Niigata and simply vanished. It turned out, much later of course, that she had been taken by a North Korean agent, who didn't realize how young she was. As the movie chronicles her disappearance and stays with her parents, who are shattered, then strengthened by the ordeal, it just gets worse and worse. You keep praying that it'll get better. Fat chance. North Korea, remember?

The movie, directed by Patty Kim and Chris Sheridan and executive produced by Jane Campion (of "The Piano" fame), might be described as typical of modern documentary processes, in that it's over-dramatized and rather too punchy for its own good. But it is a heartbreaking, gut-wrenching story of the evil that modern states allow themselves to do in the name of something called "national security."

-- Stephen Hunter

Contains emotionally intense scenes.