Cureless Rupture
Rupture
Canada/USA 2016
Directed by Steven Shainberg
Signature Entertainment
Warning: Slight spoilers here.
After my recent screening of slow burn Icelandic folk horror tale Lamb (reviewed by me here), I’d been reminded just how great the tough little Swedish actress Noomi Rapace is and I wanted to catch up on a few of her films I’d missed. So my first go to movie was a sci-fi/horror piece called Rupture from 2016 (not to be confused with two other films also called Rupture from 2021 and 2022... seriously, what is going on with movie titles these days people?).
And, yeah, it’s got a strong start as Noomi plays Renee, a divorcee living in her home with her teenage son. And it soon becomes clear, as we see them interacting in their daily life, that they are being observed via hidden cameras in their house, recording loads of details about their personal lives. Then, when Renee has dropped the son off to her dad’s for the weekend, a device planted on the hub of her car causes a blowout and she’s abducted. Almost the entirety of the rest of the movie is her undergoing sinister and deliberately intimidating experiments while she tries to escape her captors and tries to find out why the other ‘test subjects’ in the facility are also being tormented by the things they fear the most (it’s set up early on in the narrative, during the opening, that Renee is afraid of spiders). But it becomes increasingly clear that, while her captors are not extra-terrestrial in origin, they are far from human and she needs to figure out what’s going on before she finds herself joining their number.
And that’s as much of the plot as you’re going to get from me. It’s an interesting set up and it’s down completely to the way the material is approached as to the kind of movie it is. I mean, if Marvel tackled the same themes this would possibly be something like an X-Men movie but, instead, the writers and director of Rupture take a path not far from the full-on David Cronenberg body horror kind of movie... and it makes for an interesting take.
It’s also got a strong cast for this one too, with a somewhat unlikely mix of professional actors and actresses augmenting Rapace’s central, powerhouse performance. So people like Lesley Manville, Kerry Bishé, Michael Chiklis and Peter Stormare are some of the various bad guys and gals who work at the special facility. And, lets face it, when you see someone as ‘low key charismatic’ as Peter Stormare as a villain... well, you know you’re in trouble folks.
And yeah, I had quite a good time with this, in spite of the somewhat limited, claustrophobic location of the facility. It’s interesting that, while it’s a clinical place and various ‘medical horrors’ are being carried out on the ‘patients’ strapped down to the their gurneys... the lighting is all warm colours such as reds, pinks, oranges and yellows. So it makes for some nice environments to look at and, to boot, the colour scheme actually has a specific story beat to explain it... although why more is made of the obvious weakness of the ‘non-humans’ who work at the facility and the contradictory absence of this weakness in the last five minutes of the movie (despite an attempt at explaining that) is anybody’s guess.
It’s also full of some nice references, such as one of the walls of one of the many rooms of the facility using the exact same pattern as the carpet of the Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, which was cool although, it has to be said, also very distracting from the on screen action when this element is brought in. It’s not exactly a subtle reveal. And, while the story is more about mutations from humans into something entirely different (it’s a bit like the origin story of Deadpool from the Marvel movie of the same name, if you think about it) and not about anything from any other planet, there’s a lovely punchline moment when you see that, any surviving subjects who fail to deliver the results the mutations are looking for (in their search for a cure to the condition of humanity), are delivered back into society, convinced they were the victims of an alien abduction. Which was a really nice touch, I thought.
The finale of Rupture, which has a kind of unnecessary end sequence, is maybe a little weak in terms of effectively putting a full stop to the idea of the movie but, all in all I had an interesting time with this one and it almost has an Invasion Of The Body Snatchers kind of vibe to it, although in a more aggressive and closed up kind of manner, where fear and not sleep is the key to a human’s downfall. And, yeah, like I said, the acting is sensational, it all looks good and Nathan Larson’s chilling score effectively gels with the on screen visuals to push the atmosphere and bring it into the same level as the performances.
So, if sci-fi horror is your jam, then you might want to give Rupture a shot. And, after all, you can never go completely wrong when you’ve got someone like Noomi Rapace headlining your movie. Although, it has to be said by me, as the son of a man who spent his working life in the heating and engineering trade, those air vents people like to crawl around in for escaping in movies really aren’t like that in real life... they’re too small, well secured and full of machinery. Please stop using these as a way of getting your characters in and out of situations writers... it’s just not, in any way, doable. Other than that... enjoy.
No comments:
Post a Comment