Rupture, a new film by Steven Shainberg (Secretary), expressly wants you to confront your worst fears. And it succeeds, as long as your worst fear is being locked in a house with a television that only has one working channel and that channel is playing this movie.
Noomi Rapace plays Renee, a divorced mother with a dickhole of an ex-husband and a young son who is a bit crap at maths. She also has a fear of spiders, but is not too much of scaredy cat to go skydiving for the weekend. This is all established in the first seven minutes. A few minutes later, Renee is forced off the road by a deviously engineered flat tyre, drugged by Mike Leigh’s favourite actor Leslie Manville, kidnapped, bound in gaffer tape, driven hundreds of miles away and tied to a gurney in a secret inexplicably neon-lit laboratory.
It’s a breathless and ruthlessly efficient opener to a film that despite its lean running time, feels surprisingly leaden past this point.
Noomi Rapace equips herself heroically as a guinea pig, forced to undergo various experiments that are meant to provoke maximum levels of fear. You know like spiders. She hates spiders. That’s been established. Despite some clunky foreshadowing, her fear is impressively tangible. But perhaps Noomi’s real heroism comes from dealing with a clumsy script, an array of mediocre character actors (when you turn up for your first day on set and Peter Stomare is there, you might not be looking at a wide cinema release) and a plot that thinks it’s being terribly clever and original – but won’t be to anyone who has seen Martyrs or the first 30 minutes of Deadpool.
The team of ‘scientists’ (including Michael Chiklis – I think we can rightfully claim a legitimate Fantastic Four curse, there’s enough evidence to back it up now*) have been monitoring a whole group of individuals, including Renee, and now have them all caged away in a lab. Here they encounter their own personal terrors (snakes, heights, disapproving parents, toilet circling careers) in order to accelerate a secret part of their DNA and turn them into… I don’t know. I watched till the end of the movie and I’m still not terribly sure.
It seems as if the experiment unlocks some kind of special lizard power, but this only manifests itself in their eyes going a bit weird and their faces going all disfigured, thanks to some hilariously rubbish CGI. The camera loves to linger on the CGI by the way. You’ll want it to stop, not because it’s so ugly but because it looks so cheap. Peter Stormare looks like he knows what’s going on, but he’s no real help. He just pops up from time to time, says some weird shit and obsesses (just like everyone else) about how different Renee’s skin is. HER SKIN IS NO DIFFERENT.
And then Rupture ends as suddenly as it began. There’s a perception of deeper ambiguity and a brief sense that Shainberg was going for a Rosemary’s Baby style twist, but really it’s obvious the film is underwritten. Ambiguity is merely used to paper over a lack of ideas, rather than provoking further discussion. Perhaps it’s for the best, it means we can all go home and get on with our lives and forget what happened here. 2/5
*I forgot about Chris Evans. No curse can touch those winning blue eyes
Check out more of the latest cinema releases in our movie reviews section, including the riveting sci-fi film Arrival.
