"Destroyer": review

Directed by Karyn Kusama ("Girlfight," "Aeon Flux"), 2018's "Destroyer" stars Nicole Kidman in a thoroughly unglamorous role as LAPD detective Erin Bell, a cop who has made many mistakes in life, and who is running out of time to correct some of her biggest ones. When we meet Erin, she seems to be little more than a woozy drunk who has no shame about appearing at crime scenes in an inebriated state. Most of her fellow cops can't stand her, but she has a few strategically placed friends in the force, here and there, who respect her, get where she's coming from, and are willing to help her when she's pursuing thin leads.

Erin has an estranged teen daughter named Shelby (Jade Pettyjohn), a wild child who skips school, parties far too much, and runs around with 23-year-old boyfriend Jay (Beau Knapp), much to Erin's chagrin. Shelby lives with her adoptive father Ethan (Scoot McNairy), but as we learn through flashbacks, she is actually the love child of Erin and Erin's now-deceased undercover partner Chris (Sebastian Stan). Years ago, Erin and Chris had infiltrated a bank-robber gang led by the cultic, hypnotic Silas Howe (Toby Kebbell); while the gang was planning a huge robbery, Erin and Chris fell in love and decided to risk keeping a fraction of the potential cash for themselves. The robbery went wrong; Chris was killed after revealing himself to be FBI (Erin, being an LAPD greenhorn at the time, had been drafted into the undercover operation by the FBI), and Erin managed to snag a few million in cash, which she hid away and never touched, in the hopes of one day using it to help out her daughter. Flash-forward to now, and Erin is hunting Silas again because she's seen signs that Silas, who has been underground since that long-ago robbery, is active once more.

"Destroyer" does a head-fake that's a bit similar to what we saw in "Arrival": the narrative ends up forming a kind of loop that is punctuated by flashbacks that fill in Erin's history. Little by little, we come to understand that, while Erin does have a drinking problem, the reason why she spends so much of the movie talking in a gravelly whisper and stumbling about drunkenly has little to do with alcohol. The twist, then, came as a genuine surprise to me, and I thoroughly appreciated both the scriptwriting and the clever direction, which together played their cards very close to the vest. This may have been the most enjoyable aspect of the movie.

The movie's tone, though, sometimes pushed me out of the film. Director Kusama seemed to be trying for a meditative, noirish feel, something along the lines of Michael Mann meets Terrence Malick meets Denis Villeneuve, but the end result was characters who all spoke their lines with deadly, over-earnest seriousness, and there were times when that became inadvertently funny to me. Imagine a couple at a restaurant: the man is trying to bare his agonized soul to his woman, but she's got an attack of the giggles and can't take him seriously. That was, occasionally, my own relationship with this film: I was the one with the giggles. That said, I'll give Kusama points for trying, even if I don't think she quite succeeded.

Nicole Kidman has the tough duty of being the center of this story, which is told entirely from her rapidly fraying perspective. Kidman in flashback looks like her usual beautiful self, but her present-day incarnation is timeworn, hollow-cheeked, strung out, un-made-up, and generally horrific. Kusama humanizes Kidman's character, who is no ruthless Jack Bauer or clever Ethan Hunt: she's just a flawed woman whose soul-light is this close to flickering out, and she's trying to right two major wrongs in her life—the botched robbery from years ago and her botched motherhood right now—before her light is snuffed out. Kidman gives a solid performance and owns the movie, incarnating a character that is about as far away from typecasting as polar bears are from penguins.

I came away from this film with mixed feelings, but it's been several days, and the movie's story and visuals have somehow stayed with me. Not many movies leave that sort of impression these days, so while I cautiously recommend "Destroyer," I do recommend it. Now, if only I could figure out what the title actually means... does it refer to time? To the ever-hovering angel of death, which ultimately comes for us all?