I missed Destroyer first time around, when it was released in 2018. Inexplicably, so did everybody else, and it grossed just $5 million, barely half its budget. Which is criminal, as it’s one of the most intelligent and gripping thrillers made in the last decade.
The fifth film by Karyn Kusama, it was written by her husband Phil Hay and his writing partner Matt Manfredi, and is their third collaboration together.
And although her feature debut, Girlfight (2000), was lauded at Sundance and Cannes, it fared poorly at the box office. As did her next two films, Aeon Flux (‘05) and Jennifer’s Body (’09). So she spent the following 5 or 6 years working as a director for hire on television.
But she went back to the silver screen in 2015 for The Invitation, a well-regarded horror that had only a limited release. But Destroyer takes her work to a whole new level.
Confidently plotted and impeccably scripted, the direction and cinematography are constantly thoughtful and carefully choreographed. Which ought of course to be true for every film, but almost never is. While the twist is low-key, subtle and, cleverly, structural.
But the entire film revolves around the vortex that is Nicole Kidman. The gravitational pull of her self-destruction seems to drag the whole of Los Angeles down into the hole she’s hell-bent in burrowing for the grave she’s determined to dig for herself.
Kidman’s a funny one. Her choices are actually almost always both challenging and impressively intelligent. But the few duds are so glaring, they can be momentarily blinding. But really, it’s only The Stepford Wives (’04), Bewitched (’05) and Australia (08) that baffle. Birth (’04), Margot at the Wedding (’07) and Nine (’09), for instance, might not work as films, but they were all choices and risks worth taking.
This though is comfortably her best performance, and is the answer she’ll give when St Peter asks her to point to the one thing that could move him to open the pearly gates for her.
As for Kusama, she presumably finds herself once more at a crossroads. Having had her fingers burnt trying to produce commercial fodder for the Hollywood bean-counters, she was once again offered the chance to get her hands on a sizable budget, for a re-make of Dracula, only to have the project cancelled. So which way does she go now, to the left or to the right?
Does she follow the path of Kathryn Bigelow, and trade in her intelligence for dollar bills, or that of Lynne Ramsay (whose You Were Never Really Here I reviewed here) and Debra Granick, into the undergrowth and uncertainty of the independent world?
I hope somebody sits her down and forces her to watch repeated viewings of Zero Dark Thirty (’12). There but for the grace of God…
You can see the trailer for Destroyer below:
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