A plot synopsis of Destroyer, the new film from Girlfight and Æon Flux director Karyn Kusama, reads like an extremely typical gritty cop movie. And while it does concede to a number of plot and character clichés, Destroyer is certainly not typical. While it isn’t exactly unique in its story, it is thoroughly engaging in its style and direction, but most importantly in its ambiguously moral and damaged lead character.
Again, this isn’t indicative of the movies’ presentation, but Erin Bell (Nicole Kidman) is an extremely unorthodox LAPD officer who takes it upon herself to track down Silas (Toby Kebbell), a gang leader and bank robber whose organization she and her then partner Chris (Sebastian Stan) infiltrated nearly twenty years earlier. As she ruthlessly tries to ascertain his whereabouts and reflects on her time in his crew she also must deal with her estranged daughter Shelby (Jade Pettyjohn) who’s making increasingly dangerous and self-destructive choices.
Nicole Kidmans’ performance is arresting, invigorating, and terrifying. In her appearance alone she’s been stripped of all conventional artifice and made dirty and crude with heavy creases under her eyes, thin, greasy hair and bangs, and a sickly paleness to her complexion. She wouldn’t be out of place in a movie like Monster or The Revenant. But her character is also ceaselessly interesting, an anti-hero of a different calibre even in a genre known for them. While her intent is to thwart a dangerous criminal, she’s acting purely out of a vendetta, and the means she goes to to get information become increasingly more severe as the movie unfolds. We see too that her personal life is a shambles, that she’s lost all of her daughters’ respect and trust, the entirety of their relationship indicating she’d been a bad mother.
Erin regrets all of this, but also seems to know it’s too late for her to turn around, and as such is unafraid to resort to beating up a slimy lawyer (Bradley Whitford) or kidnapping Silas’ girlfriend (Tatiana Maslany). She’s not a bad cop in the way Riggs is a “bad cop”, she’s a bad cop in that she’s far too violent and unstable to be on the police force. In foiling a bank robbery, her carefree shooting is certainly liable to harm an innocent person, driven as she is to kill her target. She may be on the side of good but she is only the shell of a good person. Yet you understand all the pain that’s led her to this point even before the full details of its inception are shown. Kidman brilliantly brings this character to life in the best of a string of great performances she gave in 2018; and particularly in one scene with her daughter at a diner late in the film -which forces if not a re-evaluation than a re-contextualization of her character- and the subsequent ending, earns the Oscar nomination she didn’t receive.
The film weaves the story of her infiltration alongside the current plot in which we get a better idea of the nature of Silas’ outfit. Here we see the den the gang inhabit in squalor fit for Trainspotting, as well as Silas’ manipulative nature when he goads one underling (Zach Villa) into Russian roulette. Even though the end result of that original operation is clear in the current timeline, it unfolds pretty well and provides an origin for both Erin’s amoral trajectory and her mission in this story. Her time there is what made her. Toby Kebbell’s an often underrated actor due to appearing in movies like Fantastic Four, Warcraft, Ben-Hur, and The Hurricane Heist, but here he makes for a decently threatening villain who can live up to the reputation the movie gives him. Sebastian Stan and Tatiana Maslany are unsurprisingly really good as well, and Jade Pettyjohn really sells the disgruntled teenager taking joy in how much her mother hates her horrible older boyfriend (Beau Knapp).
Kusama directs with as brutal and dirty an aesthetic as Erin herself. The film is very muted and never really strays from its gritty tone, the colourlessness filling out the drab world and emphasizing its degradation. The intensity doesn’t wane and through every story beat, derivative though they may be, your investment is held. Because the shattering subversive nature of Destroyer keeps you on your toes for an unconventional resolution -and this is true. The film takes on new meaning at the diner scene, which transforms it into something more soulful, and everything that follows has a solemn tragedy to it that’s as unexpected as any plot twist.
It goes without saying this is one of Nicole Kidmans’ best performances; and also that that character compellingly written by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi, skilfully directed by Kusama is what carries Destroyer and allows it to leave an impact many other crime dramas otherwise like it would not.
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