Female Film Critics 24/375
Director Karyn Kusama’s Destroyer can sound, in summary, like a familiar, even trite, thriller. A slightly unhinged L.A. undercover police detective gets obsessed with an ugly vengeance crusade. But, as with Kusama’s debut feature Girlfight (2000), there the expected trajectory ends as a traumatized Erin Bell, played with ferocious fury by an almost unrecognizable Nicole Kidman, pursues her target.
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Destroyer is a modern noir with a big difference: the antihero detective — who is riddled with guilt, grief, regret and does not play by the rules — is a woman, and through her Destroyer will upend all the expectations that come with this hoariest of clichéd protagonists. We are confronted by the stereotype like never before, actually asked to reckon with it.
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Beautiful, statuesque Nicole Kidman continues to demonstrate her fearless versatility, playing a distraught mother in Boy Erased and the ethereally shimmering Queen in Aquaman before tackling Erin Bell, the boozing, brawling LAPD detective seeking revenge and redemption in this pulpy noir thriller.
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A vocal advocate for women filmmakers, Kusama has consistently spoken passionately about the importance of diversity in the film industry. The success of Destroyer will no doubt continue to raise the visibility of the platform from which Kusama speaks, not only as an artist, but as a woman whose voice has been stifled so many times by a male-dominated industry who in the past have been so shamefully dismissive of the important things she has to tell us and of her extraordinarily skillful and creative way of telling them.
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