Close

Guardian Angel

Close
UK/USA 2019
Directed by Vicky Jewson
Jewson Film

Directed by Vicky Jewson, Close is a female dominated action thriller inspired by real life bodyguard Jacquie Davis. It’s also pretty much a typical Hollywood action vehicle in some ways but it has a few things going for it to elevate above a lot of the usual, often bland films of a similar nature out there these days. One of those things is the casting of Noomi Rapace as Sam Carlson, the character loosely based on Jacquie Davis.

The basic story is, Sam is a bodyguard or, as it is properly known, a Close Protection Operator. She is assigned to a rich teenager, Zoe (played by Sophie Nélisse), whose father has died and who has been left inheriting his large company, rather than her step mother Rima (played by Indira Varma), who is in something of a bad relationship with her daughter and just wants to make sure an important deal for the future of the company is set to go ahead successfully as planned. However, when Sam stays on a few hours more after delivering Zoe to a somehow ‘less than safe’ safe house, kidnappers come for Zoe and so Sam (who has her own mother daughter issues in the form of a child she abandoned years before) has to try and get Zoe to safety somehow in a foreign land, where the powerful masterminds behind the kidnapping are working with a corrupt police force to ensure that Zoe is brought into harms way.

So, yeah, like I said, it’s a typical set up and play out for a big blockbuster action movie but, asides from the superb cast being absolutely brilliant in this (with Noomi Rapace doing all her own stunts apparently... looking at some of the things going on here, she must have had a lot of bruises at the end of each day’s shooting), the director has a good understanding of just why these films fail or succeed and gives the thing a real feeling of suspense and tension, not to mention a certain brutality injected into the mix with some of the various punch ups throughout the story.

So, yeah, the pre-credits sequence (before a rather stripped down and less richer cover version of the excellent Kate Bush song Running Up That Hill is played over the credits) does exactly what you’d expect a film like this to do. Taking a cue from the James Bond films, we see Sam in a war zone protecting two members of the press in an action sequence, to show the audience that she’s a tough character and she can get people to safety in the face of considerable opposition. It basically shows the audience that she’s not the kind of person to just roll over in the face of adversity, instead being the individual who will look for every angle she can to swipe victory (and safety) from the jaws of defeat. And, yeah, there is a moment in this opening where one of the film crew is clearly visible on the back of a small truck that the character drives off in but, you know, these things happen and it doesn’t hijack the clear message to the audience.

So later, when Sam and Zoe go on the run and play a game of cat and mouse where they get captured, put in peril again and escape, while trying to build up a close trust to each other, it is familiar territory for sure but, it’s one of those films where all the clichés and tropes of the genre are actually done right and so we get a credible and exciting action film rather than a boring one.

For example, the cinematography is gorgeous... choosing warm colours such as oranges, yellows and browns with the two main characters dressed in colours complimentary to the environments they find themselves in... but it’s also very slow and surely paced for the majority of the film. So it’s lots of long, slow takes with fluid camera movement interspersed with static shots as the actors inhabit a world where everything plays out in a way where the audience has time to connect to the characters. For example, establishing shots of various locations will be held for much longer than you might expect and often involve slow approaches to the settings. What this all does, of course, is reveal that the director knows all about how you pace an action movie, using this kind of laid back style to make pauses which allow the action sequences to surface with more sped up, more frenetic camera work and faster cuts, to actually feel much more in contrast to the style of shots surrounding those scenes. This is something directors like Kurosawa knew about but it’s an approach often overlooked in Hollywoodland these days.  

Where this technique really comes into its own is in a scene where Sam kind of goes off and has a personal cry and panic about what’s going on, finding herself in a situation where she has no idea if there are any options left. Briefly, for that moment, the camera switches to a very slow handheld style, with slight movement to the shot rather than locked in a totally static moment... this really heightens the tension in the scene and sends a message to the audience, backed up by the camera movement hooking into the subconscious perception of the shot, that the character really is a little out of control at this point. But then, as soon as the character gets her head together and rejoins the girl she is protecting, the camera switches back to a very steady, fluid or static stream of shots again, to signal to the audience that she’s once more in control of the situation. Most people probably won’t even notice it but they sure will feel it and it’s a nice example of using the visual language to enhance the emotional state of the characters on screen.

Added to this is a moment when the rug is pulled in terms of just who the villain of the piece is... which actually took me by surprise for once. If I hadn’t been so pulled into the movie and thought about the way a certain character is written and pushed to be someone unsympathetic to the audience, I would have realised that it was a set up for a reveal later on when that character comes off as not being the source of the threat so, hats off to the director for this one, for distracting me enough with the beautiful looking visuals and standing back enough to let the central performances come to light better, so that I actually didn’t see the reveal coming. I don’t often miss those kinds of things (and, yeah, I must be getting really old now).  

And that’s me pretty much done with Close. If you like your action films with a certain credible violence to them, where characters take time to recover from being punched and knife and bullet wounds are shown to hurt the characters and have some kind of impact on them (Noomi’s face is the worse for wear with small, healing wounds throughout the movie due to her experiences depicted in the opening credit scene) then you should definitely give Close some eyeball time. Despite the formulaic story line, I thought it was an impressive piece and would recommend this one above certain other action genre movies of recent years.