The Disappearance of Alice Creed

Review by Anthony Morris

It's easy enough to keep people interested in your film when you can afford shoot-outs and explosions and millions of dollars worth of CGI; but how do you manage it when your entire movie only features three people, and three quarters of it takes place in one tiny flat?

If you are writer / director J Blakeson, you manage it in two ways :

First, you have a great opening sequence in which two men – Danny (Martin Compston) and Vic (Eddie Marsan) wordless go out and buy the supplies to turn the flat into a prison cell, then turn the flat into a prison, then kidnap a young woman (Gemma Arterton) and hold her captive.

Just watching the way they calmly and thoroughly go about their sinister business makes the first third of this film totally gripping, and if you're even slightly interested in crime films it's enough to make this a must see.

The second way Blakeson goes about keeping our attention is by slowly filling in the backstory behind all three characters, and while revealing too much about her would ruin the film, the links between them aren't always what you’d expect.

This material works well too for a while, thanks in part to good performances from all three that sell the various connections, but there comes a point where it all gets a little too much.

It doesn’t exactly ruin things, but for a film that – early on at least – seemed to be working hard to convince us of its reality, it becomes a bit too much to take with a straight face.

The opening scenes suggest that if Blakeson had the courage to simply let the kidnapping play itself out, he might have made a truly gripping thriller; instead, by piling on the twists until the whole edifice totters, this ends up as less than the sum of its generally excellent parts.

3 out of 5

The Disappearance of Alice Creed
Australian release: 9th September, 2010
Official Site: The Disappearance of Alice Creed
Cast: Gemma Arterton, Martin Compston, Eddie Marsan
Director: J Blakeson