DESTROYER: Grinding To Glory

We’ve all seen this one before: a cop with a shady past must right their sins, and in doing so, hopefully find relief from their tortured existence. It’s a tale that predates film, so anyone taking on this old cliché must find a new angle on the material or risk boring their audience to death.

That was the task in front of Destroyer director Karyn Kusama, who was riding high after her well-received thriller The Invitation. On paper, Destroyer seemed like it would be something quite similar: a tense, slow burn that would unwrap dark secrets. That’s what many have crafted these stories to be, which is why the film she actually delivered is so surprising.

Destroyer is barely a thriller. It’s a grinder, a punisher, the last rattling gasp from an empty husk. Anyone looking for a standard take on this story will be disappointed, but those who are willing to descend to its main character will find themselves uncomfortably immersed in a world that long ago had hope wrenched away.

Who Needs A Hero

This off-kilter approach is established immediately as the film drops you right into the heart of the action. Nicole Kidman’s Erin Bell stumbles into a homicide scene in the film’s opening moments, and her fellow detectives don’t hold back their disdain. They all but usher her away, dismissing Bell outright for her disheveled appearance and apparent inability to perform meaningful police work.

The strange thing about Destroyer, and what really sets it apart from other films of its ilk, is that it never contradicts this assessment. Bell is a strung-out mess throughout, and she struggles to perform any of the tasks in front of her. Most films position their rogue cop as a berserker or at least a guy who can handle any situation he stumbles into. Bell, of course, is not a man, and the casting of an extra-frail Kidman only highlights a fact of life for most women: we can’t physically control a situation.

The brilliance of what Kusama, Kidman, and writers Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi have done is that they constructed an anti-hero saga around someone who can’t really be a hero. Bell’s worn down, beaten body is as tattered as her mind, so even confronting ex-junkies and the twenty-something punk who’s dating her daughter are monumental tasks for our protagonist.

That she succeeds at all is only due to her doggedness, and it’s this fact that gives the film its deliberate pace. Everything about Destroyer is crafted to reflect the state of its central character, which means the film itself sags and stumbles and wallows in gloom. This may very well turn you off (it certainly doesn’t make for pleasurable viewing), but it’s remarkable to see a director and an actress so precisely feeding off each other.

Inadvertent Strengths

In a strange way, the film’s scrappiness also helps absorb many of its shortcomings. If you buy into Destroyer being a reflection of Bell, then you would expect it to make mistakes and throw in more than a few oddities. Destroyer certainly has plenty of these things, but they mostly sink into the abrasive milieu of the film.

The most obvious and consistent problem is the makeup on Kidman, which seems so caked on that she passes straight by looking haggard and approaches becoming a raccoon impersonator. It’s very over-the-top, but her jarring appearance is sort of fitting. None of the other characters are comfortable around her, so why should the audience be?

The makeup also immediately tells you what time period a scene is in, which is a necessity since the movie continuously jumps back and forth between Bell’s former undercover work and her current search for the leader of the group she infiltrated.

Despite these events being about fifteen years apart, all of the actors play their characters in both time periods, and none of their aging makeup is convincing. Poor Toby Kebbell is weighed down by a long wig for the earlier period, which doesn’t de-age him so much as make him seem like a guy clinging desperately to his hippie years. Add in the fact that these parts are played by high-calibre actors like Sebastian Stan and Tatiana Maslany, who all give great performances despite their bizarre accoutrements, and the constant mishmash of good and bad only adds to the unease.

Maintaining The Meanness

There’s an annoying trope in this genre where the gruff protagonist gets their slice of redemption, which Kusama keeps at bay for an impressive amount of time. There are a few moments where this slips in, though, and they go against everything she’s made Bell and the film out to be.

Bell admits that she is a broken person, a product of abuses and hardships that form the overarching theme of violence begetting more violence. This is a common notion for movies like this, but the difference here is that no one lets her use that as an excuse, including herself. She has destroyed things as much as the person she is going after has, and the tendrils of their damage extend far beyond anything that can be fixed. The acknowledgement of this is steeped into the film’s core, giving it an oppressive listlessness and setting up an anti-climax that feels just right.

The film thrives when it allows Bell to be irredeemable, when it makes the character and the audience look that fact dead in the eye. That Bell picks herself up and keeps going despite that knowledge is the crux of the film, so anytime Kusama flinches and lets redemption slip in, the film falters.

Conclusion: Destroyer

Soaking in nastiness is the strength of Destroyer, which makes it a tough but riveting watch. Kidman and Kusama work impeccably together to create an anti-heroine who can shoulder the weight of a familiar genre while rarely giving in to easy tropes. While this may cause the film to go against what people expect of the genre, and it certainly makes for unpleasant film on the surface, the frank look at old themes more than makes up for its abrasiveness.

Did you respond well to the film’s tough exterior? Did you see something worthwhile in all the anguish? Let us know in the comments!

Destroyer opens in the US on December 25th, 2018 and in the UK on January 25th, 2019. For international release dates, click here.