Destroyer (2019) - Movie Review

"(Famous actor) as you've never seen them before", goes the tacky marketing push for films like this. Not to say that this mode can’t be done well, as it has for Charlize Theron in Monster or Steve Carell in Foxcatcher or even Tilda Swinton in Suspiria. It’s just that there’s something slightly patronising about the idea that special make-up is a bigger selling point than the actor on their own merits. It’s especially weird in situations like this, as the transformative aspect of this film isn’t even as intensive as Monster or Foxcatcher.

There’s no point in this film where the audience simply forgets who they’re looking at; the make-up isn’t that good. But more to the point, the idea that this is Nicole Kidman turning a new leaf? After seeing her perform one of the greatest verbal emasculations in the history of cinema back with Secret In Their Eyes, this is the kind of shit I’ve been eagerly awaiting her to revisit. And thankfully, she doesn’t disappoint.

Much like with Secret, this film carries a very unsettling and grim tone for its entire running time, building up Kidman’s hard-nosed detective Erin and her winding procedural journey relating to a past undercover operation that went disastrous. Director Karyn Kusama, who has built a healthy if underappreciated pedigree for stories about strong and damaged female characters, makes a film about bank robberies where we don’t end up seeing much of said robberies into a highly tense experience.

Every second that ticks away gives birth to a myriad of opportunities for shit to go wrong, and because Kidman isn’t playing a typical overpowered action lead here, there’s every chance that those opportunities could be fulfilled. Admittedly, this includes a scene where she is in the perplexing position of needing to give a dying criminal a handjob as part of the procedural chain, but while it occasionally dips into the weird, it never dips out of the unease.

But more than anything explicitly to do with crime genre trappings, this is ultimately a character study of Erin. And where the film gets its most grim is when it enters her psyche and slowly unwraps why she looks and acts like life beat the living hell out of her. Seriously, if there’s anything she sells harder than the brief blips of action thrills, it’s the wince-inducing damage that is done to her. This gets rough, and where it gets interesting is in how, no matter what happens to her, it’s honestly difficult to sympathise too closely with her. Because everything that happens to her and around her, to put it simply, is her own fault.

She is the titular Destroyer, the one who spends the entirety of this two-hour effort trying to correct her past mistakes, even while knowing that there are some things that she will never be able to fix. It’s the kind of no-going-back narrative that fits in with the usual revenge thriller crowd, except here, there isn’t any real catharsis to be had in that revenge. There’s little to be felt here that isn’t laced with immense dread, and because of that, what the film lacks in outright carnage, it more than makes up for with sobering reality and a light dash of heartache.

Kidman may not have a double-take visage like all the marketing has built up, but she is still giving a character performance that should feel entirely out of her range. I mean, yeah, Secret set some precedent for it, but seeing her in a role this physically and thematically unromantic is quite astonishing. As someone who has been steadily growing more and more appreciation for her work the more I cover it, initially not even liking her at all when I started out, this has to go down as one of Kidman’s defining roles, and one that ultimately makes this film required viewing far as I’m concerned.