The Disappearance of Alice Creed

It’s important to learn from your mistakes, especially when it comes to relationships. And sometimes you need those who are closest to you to make it clear when you’ve made a mistake. One of the few interruptions of the tension in The Disappearance of Alice Creed comes as Alice, chained to a bed in an anonymous apartment, points out one of these very mistakes: ‘When you love someone,’ she says, ‘you don’t kidnap them. When you love someone you don’t put a knife to their throats.’ Ahhh….

Once the lightbulb of revelation above my head had switched itself off, I was returned to the claustrophobic world of this low-budget British thriller. One of the risks of British crime thrillers is that they tend to attract a case of Jason Statham (as his biography on IMDB warns: ‘Jason Statham has done quite a lot in a short time’); but one of the good things about very low-budget films is that they tend to repel expensive names and special effects in favour of imagination. The Disappearance of Alice Creed is set in about three locations: the apartment where Alice spends her time tied up; a white van; a warehouse. This limitation adds to the feeling of constriction: it is set in an ambiguous part of the country, near a forest, near a town, near a car park. The film’s penultimate sequence involves a slow pan away from the three key locations to a cello soundtrack as if we were leaving places of childhood sweetness – an odd sensation, especially given what’s gone on in these places.

That isn’t the only off-note in the film. If you’ve heard anything about this film it’s that it involves lots of twists. The problem with films that depend on lots of twists is that most audiences have surfeited themselves on said twists and as a result, what is meant to be unpredictable is about as unexpected as watching The Sixth Sense after your friend has just told you to watch out at the very end as you’ll never see it coming. The more a director knows that s/he is running short on decent twists, the more they’ll case the plot in a massive soundtrack so that even if your intelligence isn’t shocked, your ears will at least be stunned enough to scare you into feeling surprised. The Disappearance of Alice Creed doesn’t pack its twists in a big, shouty soundtrack. Instead it goes in the opposite direction and decides to risk unintentional comedy. I read in one review that the reviewer hasn’t heard of a cinema when the audience didn’t break out in laughter at (if I remember rightly) the second big twist. The problem is the clash between the film’s naturalistic tone – people with normal physiques and faces, characters who need to go to the toilet, people who panic and have to think for a bit before they make up their mind – and the film-student storyline with its near preposterous handbrake turns.

But the film is essentially a very good thriller, despite the moments of extravagance. The opening in particular – by the time a word has been spoken, two men have furnished a barren apartment with bed, soundproofed walls and boarded up windows, kitted out a stolen white van and kidnapped a girl. When thrillers work best they do so by tempting you into thinking that this could happen, and the commitment to showing the workings of Vic and Danny’s plan – the hardware store, the bike lock – links up the everyday with horror. Then there’s the flickering between kindness and violence, as when Danny and Vic, with the tenderness of carers, help Alice go to the toilet before chaining her back up again. It’s worth watching – certainly not for the script – but for the delicious feelings of terror and relief as the credits roll and you realise you’ve seen a very good British thriller without anyone with an Ironic Nickname hamming up a Mockney accent and firing off shotguns like tomorrow’s disappeared.

Nathan Koblintz



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