Destroyer

Last night I went to see Destroyer, a film I've been wanting to see for months.  The trailer really intrigued me because it seemed to feature a tormented character looking for redemption which is a favorite theme of mine.  The tormented character in this film is LAPD Detective Erin Bell (Nicole Kidman) who, twenty years ago, infiltrated a notorious gang in an undercover operation with an FBI agent (Sebastian Stan) that involved a robbery gone wrong.  She was clearly traumatized by this event and, with her career in shambles and her relationship with her daughter (Jade Pettyjohn) in crisis, she responds to a murder scene which she believes is a message for her that Silas (Toby Kebbell), the leader of the gang, has resurfaced.  On her own, she cruises the underbelly of Los Angeles looking for former gang members Toby (James Jordan), Arturo (Zach Villa), and Petra (Tatiana Maslany) as well as DiFranco (Bradley Whitford), a crooked lawyer who launders money for the gang, to find Silas and exact vengeance.  Interspersed with her search for Silas are flashbacks to her time in the gang and the ill-fated robbery with an interesting revelation about her participation (and another interesting revelation in the present).  It is a fairly standard story of revenge but it is elevated by a transformative performance by Kidman who makes you care about a thoroughly unpleasant person doing reprehensible things.  The rest of the cast is uniformly good as well, especially Whitford and Maslany.  This film, in many ways, reminded me of You Were Never Really Here in that there is a kind of beauty in the brutality (Bell is thoroughly battered and bruised throughout but never wavers in her determination to set things right) and the redemption comes from an unexpected source.  Not everyone will enjoy this movie but I think it is brilliant.