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United Kingdom · 2009
Rated R · 1h 40m
Director J Blakeson
Starring Gemma Arterton, Martin Compston, Eddie Marsan
Genre Crime, Drama, Thriller
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Two former convicts kidnap Alice Creed, daughter of a millionaire, and bring her to an abandoned, soundproofed apartment. They tie her to a bed and send pictures to her father, demanding that he send them his money in exchange for his daughter. A taught, nail-biting thriller of a film.
Blakeson's feature-length calling card has storyboarded austerity and sadomasochistic promise but in the end lets the game play out in a familiar flurry of double-crossings, two-timings and false deaths, content to only fetishize itself.
Crisp handling, some clever twists and a welcome streak of dry humor hold attention throughout
The Hollywood Reporter by Frank Scheck
Taut, superbly executed and consistently engrossing, The Disappearance of Alice Creed marks an auspicious feature debut for writer-director J Blakeson.
Crisply and efficiently, we're transported to the realm of the kidnapping thriller--and if Brit writer-director J Blakeson knew how to sustain tension for another hour and change, we'd be heralding the next Jonathan "Sexy Beast" Glazer.
Los Angeles Times by Kevin Thomas
A glum British kidnap movie in which writer-director J Blakeson manages to generate tension and some suspense, never rises above the mechanical and contrived, finally lapsing into the improbable.
A small but perfectly formed crime drama. And, without making a fuss, a proper nail-biter, too.
A clever little contraption, even though it runs into the problem that a lot of twist-heavy suspense movies have: Once it's spooned out all its surprises about two-thirds of the way through, it loses a lot of its entertainment value.
Entertainment Weekly by Owen Gleiberman
A brutally monotonous thriller.
Boxoffice Magazine by Pam Grady
Dazzling turns by stars Eddie Marsan, Martin Compston and Gemma Arterton; unrelenting suspense; and a wealth of black humor will appeal to an arthouse crowd, though the violence and other unsavory aspects of the story will turn off some.
A grim, toxic, psychological British thriller, brimming with surprises, that always manages to be quite a bit more than it appears on the surface.
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