Destroyer is a film noir set in daylight saturated Los Angeles starring Nicole Kidman as a woman on a mission to wrap up one of her early cases that haunted her for the rest of her life. Karyn Kusama directed it, and it may be her best film yet. She made Girlfight, Aeon Flux and Jennifer’s Body. It actually may have been one of the best films of 2018, but it did not do well in the box office and was poorly reviewed. After a lifetime of sneaking food into the theater, I finally got caught before the last showing of this film in my area, and I chose my real butter popcorn over watching the film on the big screen. I am a twenty-first century Esau. Forgive me, Kusama! I have since made up for it by watching it several times at home, and I may not be done yet.
I do not want to spoil it, but after you watch Destroyer, once you get it, you may want to watch it repeatedly too. It is visually stunning, feels like an ode of love to Los Angeles and employs the use of light brilliantly. Theodore Shapiro composed a pitch perfect soundtrack that is both ethereal and brutally electronic at turns. Kusama employs and subverts narrative tropes that I normally hate in a seamless way that feels fresh and mindblowing with only one minor, but forgivable flaw: the detective could not have witnessed one scene that gets depicted in the film. Pay close attention and do not take for granted that you understand the rhythm of this narrative. It gives more than you think. In one sequence that switches from first person perspective to surveillance camera footage, what seems distant and removed seems tragic and devastating. It could be a dispassionate, obvious outcome, but Kusama finds a visual way for us to empathize with unlikeable characters. Most actors have to play three layers of themselves: then, now and the shade of their memory. As much as I hate to do it, I have to praise Kidman for adding to her repertoire the laser look of love to the gaze of fierce determination. While still being a realistic human woman, she just keeps unrelentingly moving forward even though she looks like Christian Bale going to physical method extremes to play a character.
The first thirty minutes of Destroyer is just a theater of demeaning, disrespectful grinding down of the detective as she endures all kinds of indignities to get what she wants. Imagine a young punk lecturing you on how to live your life. When she finally has enough, a little after forty minutes, the entire movie goes bananas, and I realized that it was no ordinary police procedural. Usually guys play the detective who breaks the rules, but once you have seen the film once, if you decide to rewatch, you will get exactly what triggers this detective and finally makes her snap. From that point on, the film becomes a symphony of purpose and resolution to finally purge a great evil from her life and save others from becoming her.
I loved how Destroyer was completely not supernatural in its version of evil, and yet the characters psychological reaction and relationship to the quotidian villain of their life is as if they were burned from the inside out by a great evil that left them a husk of their former selves. If the movie has a flaw, it could be false expectations of a more sensational supernatural element because the gang has a cult like feel. Kusama employs the dissonance of audio with visual which occasionally creates the impression that the gang leader and the detective are speaking telepathically, and he can read her mind. While this film is stressing how evil touches and ruin lives, it is clear that there is nothing supernatural. Kusama wisely does not get bogged down in the logistics of this unhealthy, dysfunctional group while still conveying the danger of dominance. One minor villain reveals her vulnerability and fear of returning home, but the detective is immune to the fact that this person may be an adult, but is a clueless young adult, not a mastermind. These are human beings stuck in tragedies that are not unique yet their effect is personal and devastating. In the end, no one is watching, but the detective is determined to make everyone accountable, including herself. If this film was a book in the Bible, it would be Esther. God would never make an appearance, but the detective’s desperation to save children, another generation, from being lost and touched as she was can be felt as her urgent, silent mission statement.
Normally I hate when films make women’s plot involve protecting children, but the exception is Destroyer because it is not obviously related to the plot, but a tertiary motivation. The association is obvious from her perspective, but not necessarily linear. The most fascinating part of men speaking out as adult survivors of childhood abuse is how they discuss being triggered when they have children and they recall their traumatic experiences as their children near the age when they were initially abused. In this film, sixteen years have passed since the detective’s first assignment, but there is an implied danger to all children in this film as the criminals in her daily life raise their children and expose them to evil. She is failing and impotent to stop the cycle from repeating. It also helps that she is an awful mother and treats her kid like a suspect than her child. If the movie was not so dour and wistful (at times it reminded me of 25th Hour, my favorite Spike Lee movie), it would be hilarious, especially some of the chase scenes.
Destroyer is extremely deft at showing how hostility and love are next door neighbors. As the detective follows her human breadcrumbs, we see how the actors constantly shift between suspicion, falling into old patterns of positioning back to hostility. Zach Villa captures it, but Tatiana Maslany matches Kidman in fearless, naked rawness in their interaction. It is also fascinating after so much tragedy, that Kusama finds a way to make it a realistic happy ending albeit a bittersweet one. All art falls into one category: heaven, hell, before and after the fall. Kusama finds a way to use nature in the final scenes to embody a journey from after the fall to a possible way back and flashbacks to finally show the beauty in this sordid world. We saw how everything got soiled, but now we are rewarded to see how it seemed plausible and decent.
I loved Destroyer so much that I may rewatch it with the writer and director commentary. I do not understand why some films by women that absolutely ruin the genre that they are supposed to belong to get praise whereas others that find fresh new ways of depicting the genre while still adhering to it get panned. If Ari Aster is the new auteur of horror, Kusama may have discovered that she is new auteur of crime dramas. I hope that she did not get discouraged from further exploring this genre.