Destroyer review: Nicole Kidman’s cop is on the warpath in downbeat thriller

Charlotte O'Sullivan25 January 2019

Hollywood likes to debunk its glamorous image, but only in small doses.

Melissa McCarthy’s turn in Can You Ever Forgive Me? has just earned her a Best Actress Oscar nomination. By contrast, Nicole Kidman’s performance in Destroyer got snubbed.

The central characters in both films are grouchy alcoholics who look like hell (their hairdos resemble something a distressed cat might cough up). Academy voters possibly baulked at putting a spotlight on two such damsels. Just because the Oscars have sidelined Destroyer, though, doesn’t mean we have to.

Admittedly, much about this crime thriller is frustrating. Director Karyn Kusama recycles revenge-yarn clichés, apparently convinced that having a woman on the warpath is innately subversive. Erin (Kidman) is an LAPD cop and, via flashbacks, we learn she was once pretty. Almost two decades ago she was sent undercover with an FBI agent (Sebastian Stan) to infiltrate a gang of bank robbers, led by Silas (Toby Kebbell).

Something went wrong and now Erin’s a sun-warped wreck. Convinced that Silas is back in town, she staggers through the city’s mean streets getting the better of various baddies, who are handily always low on staff. She also performs a hand-job, crossly. And weaponises a bar of soap.

Consistently excellent: Nicole Kidman as Erin Bell in Destroyer

It’s (unintentionally) amusing. Luckily, in the second half things improve. The turning point is a bone-crunching fight between Erin and another woman. Kusama loves a good scrum (see Girlfight). And as it becomes clear that Erin has a properly ginormous skeleton in her closet, tension levels rise.

Kidman is consistently excellent. In her scenes with Stan, the pair’s chemistry is, simultaneously, itchy and woozy. Meanwhile, look out for her final interaction with Jade Pettyjohn as Shelby, Erin’s wild-child daughter. Initially, Erin’s quest to get rid of Shelby’s ne’er-do-well boyfriend seems creepy. In the grand tradition of The Searcher’s Ethan Edwards, Erin thinks she can drag the girl back to hearth and home. Be patient, though; Kidman complicates that dynamic beautifully.

Even the twist works (just about). The whole thing could be called As I Lay Dying. Like Faulkner’s Addie Bundren, Erin isn’t a lovely woman; she’s a woman who loves intensely.

Imagine an episode of Cagney & Lacey aimed at angst-ridden self-harmers. This uneven and downbeat film will play to small audiences — but that it exists is kind of wonderful.

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1/8

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