Climbing Higher Pictures

The following review was written in conjunction with the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival and reflects the cut of the film which screened for Press.

The Disappearance of Alice Creed Review

By Ryan Hamelin

Movie Grade: A

I’d be lying if I said that this is the kind of movie I normally enjoy. People getting kidnapped, tied up, and potentially abused by perverted lunatics are among my least favorite stories. I also tend to shy away from horror films in general, as their appeal is all but lost on me the majority of the time. I don’t enjoy movies which are inherently tense to that degree, as the tension isn’t always earned, and just sort of arrives along with the premise. If a film can’t generate the powerful feelings it’s looking for through its own means and has to rely simply on our innate human sentiments to do it instead, I don’t consider that successful storytelling. It’s like making use of a tragedy to give a film added weight (cough, Remember Me, cough) and it almost always feels disingenuous.

Here, however, we have an incredibly well crafted glimpse into the world of kidnappers and their victims, a tense and visceral experience that can be positively compared to many other 1-2 location dramas with few characters and many complications. Nothing is ever precisely what it appears to be, but you don’t really know that going in. It could just turn out very stereotypical, and the filmmakers let you sweat it out for a while before finally tossing you a bone. It’s satisfying to learn about what’s really going on along with the characters, and you never feel like you’re more in the loop than they are. By the time all of the plot conceits are laid bare, you just sort of have to lean back in your chair and stare at the whole thing in wonderment.

Gemma Arterton plays Alice, a rich girl whose gossip rag antics made her an easy target for our pair of kidnappers. This is easily the most acting we’ve seen her perform in a film, and it’s refreshing to know that she can manage it when given a script that lets her stretch her wings a little bit. She also demonstrates herself to be extremely game for nudity and physical punishment, managing to feel realistically defiant and terrified at the same time. Eddie Marsan, fresh off his role as Chief Inspector from Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes movie, delivers a rather terrifying performance as Vic, the senior member of the team, and also the brains behind the operation. The way he manages to swing from emotional highs to emotional lows in such a short span of time speaks volumes about the instability of the character and how far he is willing to go to get what he wants. The big surprise is Martin Compston who I remember as a Scottish soccer fan in the collection of short stories called Tickets. Having not kept track of his career after that, it was a bit of a shock to see his work here, as he’s grown considerably from both a maturity and acting standpoint. The three of them are the entire casting backbone of this story, and if any one of them didn’t pull their weight, the whole film would come crashing down.

In the long run, it’s not a perfect film. In fact, it appears to make no effort to hide its issues with keeping the pace taut through endless character revelations. With a wider scope, it could have gotten away with fewer twists, but as it stands it maintains a claustrophobic sensibility that fits with the subject matter. It also does what so few thrillers manage to do, and ends in a satisfyingly harsh finale. Whatever you thought the ending would be going in, I can guarantee it won’t be the one you were anticipating at the outset, and for that alone, I can’t give it anything but high praise.