Set in New York City, it focuses on a mentally disturbed man trying to come to terms with the abduction of his daughter several months earlier and the relationship he develops with a young girl and her mother.

Searching for his missing daughter Sophia in the Port Authority Bus Terminal, from which she was abducted several months earlier, William Keane confronts ticket agents and random passersby with a newspaper account of her disappearance, but no one recalls seeing the little girl.

After spending the night wandering the streets and sleeping along the side of the highway, he returns to the cheap hotel where he is living and finds he is unable to get into his room.

Alone in his hotel room, Keane drinks beer and talks to himself about his ex-wife and the birth of their daughter, and he reads the clippings about another abducted New Jersey girl who was found and reunited with her parents he keeps in an envelope.

Desperate not to lose Kira because she reminds him so much of Sophia, Keane goes to her school, takes her without permission, and brings her with him to the Port Authority, allegedly to meet her mother there and board a bus to Albany.

"[2] The result was In God's Hands, produced by Steven Soderbergh and starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard, which centered on the disintegration of a family after a child had been abducted.

[5] Kerrigan knew the location of the film would be a key plot element, and he wrote much of the script while walking around New York City, trying to get a feel for the main character and their surroundings.

Shooting was completed within 32 days,[7] and many of the Manhattan and North Bergen, New Jersey locations Kerrigan selected were remote, unfamiliar streets and backdrops used to help emphasise the downward spiral of the central character.

The website's consensus reads: "The scrutinizing camera angles of Keane might at first feel too close for comfort, but this powerful portrait of a man distraught by the abduction of his child plumbs the depths of mental illness and the corners of fleabag hotels in an intimate and touching examination of the seedier side of life.

"[10] Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times stated, "In a wholly unexpected and ultimately gratifying experience from writer-director Lodge Kerrigan, Keane is emotionally involving right from the beginning through its final frame .

His focus naturally is primarily on Keane, yet he captures the relentlessly drab and impersonal urban landscapes in a way that reinforces the terrible isolation of William's anguished odyssey.

As a rigorous filmmaker, Kerrigan eschews conventional exposition, which raises the possibility that William may be sufficiently deranged to have imagined his daughter's presumed abduction, perhaps even the child's existence.

Tantalizing as this may sound, Kerrigan doesn't seem to be the kind of filmmaker who's playing with a tricky ambiguity, and Keane's recollections of the last moments leading up to his daughter's disappearance seem too vivid to be anything but excruciatingly real.

"[11] John McMurtrie of the San Francisco Chronicle called the film "taut and suspenseful" and said, "Damian Lewis delivers a convincing, powerful and highly nuanced performance...

Fifteen minutes shorter than the original, it is preceded by a message from Soderbergh that reads, "While I was away on location, Lodge sent me a copy of Keane to look at before he locked picture.