TL;DR – This is a film that holds its cards very close to its chest but that makes the slow burn that much better
Score – 3.5 out of 5 stars
Post-Credit Scene – There is no post-credit scene

Review –
Okay … wow, this is a difficult film to
parse because its structure and tone jump
all over the place and it is a film guards its biggest conceit at all times.
This also makes it a difficult film to review because there are vignettes
throughout that I really like and really didn’t and it is hard to conceptualise
that without immediately running into spoilers. However, that is what we will
attempt to do.
So to set the scene, we open on Erin Bell (Nicole Kidman) a detective in the LAPD
who has clearly had a tough life, and is clearly worse for wear after a long
night of drinking. She is arriving at a
murder scene of a John Doe that had been shot multiple times. The police on
site were not happy to see Erin, and even less so when she implies she knows
who did it because she recognises the tattoo on the back of his neck and the money
covered in die spread around the body as a warning. All of this is confirmed
when we next see Erin at her office and she gets a letter with one of the dyed
bills revealing a past that haunts her to this day.

There
are a lot of themes at play here, like greed, rage, and getting in too deep,
and all of these themes reinforce a story that grows like a tide, slowly coming
in before immersing you. This slow build as Erin traces back through her past
revealing her future could put you off especially with what she is forced to do
to get the information she needs from a terminally ill former associate.
However, as we see her past and what led her to here, the world begins to take
shape. It was really interesting to see this film, which you have seen some versions
of in the past, but this time the old grizzled cop is a woman. This creates a whole new dimension to a scenario that might
have been otherwise too familiar.
A lot of this film works solely because Nicole Kidman is here for anything it
throws at her. We see the cold hard Erin, who has seen the world ripped out
from underneath her, and nothing is going well, like having a daughter Shelby (Jade
Pettyjohn) who is ditching school and dating a guy at least six years older
than here. However, we also see the young idealistic Erin who is ready for
anything and deeply in love with Chris (Sebastian Stan) which is important because
that is her cover as they infiltrate the gang of Silas (Toby Kebbell). There is
almost a tonal whiplash as you jump from
the two different timelines, but it makes sense as the story unfolds.

While
this a film that acts more on the meditation of the past and how it affects the future, there are moments of heightening tension throughout that has you
sitting on the edge of your seat. However, to talk about this we need to engage
[SPOILERS] for the rest of the review.
For me, one of those moments is when Erin
is tailing Petra (Tatiana Maslany) only to stumble into an armed robbery which immediately
brings her back to that heist that took so much from her. All of this leads to
the end which is what made the film for me, but as we are discussing the end [MAJOR SPOILER WARNING]. It almost the
last moments of the film we discover that we had been watching the film out of
order. Yes, we have been jumping in-between
the past and the present, however, in the present we are not seeing things in
the order that happened. This is because the John Doe at the start was Silas
who Erin killed. We are not seeing everything in the right order and because of
that, we made an assumption about Erin right from the start that was unfounded. She
was not drunk but dying from internal bleeding. Indeed when you think back to
the rest of the film, the clues are all there, and it is one of those twists
that I really liked because it was set up, just you were not paying attention
to the details.
While this ending did put everything in context for me, it does not mean that this
is a perfect film at all. While Nicole’s acting is amazing, she is doing it out
from behind one of the more distracting wigs I have seen in cinema, that looks
fine in some of the close-up shots, but
not at all the moment you go any further out. As well as this, while the ending
of the film put everything in context for me, it was a tough slog to get
through at times before that.

In the end, do we recommend Destroyer? Yes, with some caveats. This is not an action film, or even a police shoot-em-up film, or a heist film, so if you come in expecting that you will walk away disappointed. However, if you want to sit back and watch Nicole Kidman give a master class in rage, then this is the film for you.
By Brian MacNamara: You can follow Brian on Twitter Here, when he’s not chatting about Movies and TV, he’ll be talking about International Relations, or the Solar System.
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Credits – All images were created by the cast, crew, and production companies of Destroyer
Directed by – Karyn Kusama
Written by – Phil Hay & Matt Manfredi
Music by – Theodore Shapiro
Cinematography by – Julie Kirkwood
Edited by – Plummy Tucker
Production/Distribution Companies – 30West, Automatik Entertainment, Annapurna Pictures & Madman
Starring – Nicole Kidman, Sebastian Stan, Toby Kebbell, Tatiana Maslany, Bradley Whitford, Jade Pettyjohn, Scoot McNairy, Toby Huss, Zach Villa, James Jordan, Beau Knapp, Shamier Anderson, Kelvin Han Yee & Natalia Cordova-Buckley
Rating – Australia: MA15+; Canada: 14A; Germany: na; New Zealand: R; United Kingdom: 15; United States: R