Today, March 21st, is filmmaker Karyn Kusama’s birthday. Today is also my birthday. And so, in a self-indulgent, but thematic installment of this newsletter, I’m going to wax poetic about Kusama’s most recent feature film, Destroyer.
I truly feel like I have not shut up about Destroyer since I saw it back in 2018. In it, Nicole Kidman stars as Erin Bell, a real mess of an LAPD detective who is forced to face the greatest mistake of her life head-on when Silas (Toby Kebbell), the leader of the gang she was involved with as an undercover cop, resurfaces after 16 years. It was from an unfortunate seat in a theater packed for a director spotlight screening of this film that I had my formal introduction to the works of Karyn Kusama, and discovered my love for neo-noir.
I say “formal” introduction because I had seen Æon Flux and Jennifer’s Body before, but Destroyer came at just the right time in my more focused exploration into film. Admittedly, my initial path to this movie was via Sebastian Stan, an actor I’ve followed into many a project, for better and for worse. But now, I was also paying attention to who was behind the camera on the movies I watched, and it was exciting to connect the dots of the filmography of this director who thrives in genre, a woman with a last name from a Japanese father, similar to my own, and then to be blown away by her new film.
I’m aware, sometimes painfully so, that Destroyer isn’t the most common gateway into Kusama’s filmography, or into the genre of neo-noir. I hadn’t even fully processed my first viewing of the film when, during the Q&A that followed the screening, a woman in the audience expressed a desire for Bell to have been more nurturing with her daughter, and remarked that her character could have been a man. The particular film festival we were at is one I’d been to before, and in the past, I’d relished being a black sheep with regards to the demographics of this particular audience. In this instance, I suddenly felt very alone in my own gender nonconformity (and also annoyed that someone could watch this movie and misunderstand the character so entirely – Bell’s fraught relationship with her daughter is the emotional crux of the film). But I wasn’t alone. In her response, Kusama spoke how the femininity and masculinity she recognizes in herself inform her work. Not only did I leave that screening with a new favorite movie, I also had a new favorite filmmaker.
What’s so enticing to me about Destroyer and a character like Erin Bell, which is also what I’m drawn to in films that followed like Albert Shin’s Disappearance at Clifton Hill and Julia Hart’s I’m Your Woman, is that they show that there are so many spaces within well explored genres that women still haven’t had as much of a chance to occupy. Bell in particular doesn’t just subvert familiar roles, she escapes singular definition. She is both the compromised detective and, to an extent, the femme fatale. She’s a lot of things, really. Kusama describes every character who Bell interacts with as a mirror held up to her. No one is just a stepping stone to Silas, and Silas isn’t even really the antagonist of the movie. He just presents the most damning reflection of Bell to herself.
People really like to dwell on Kidman’s “transformation” for this role, meaning her look as present-day Bell, to the point where it seems like a primary stumbling block for critics. I know we can’t really control the things that take us out of a movie viewing experience, but also, simply put, she’s supposed to look bad. She’s someone who only knows how to keep going, but can’t be bothered to take care of herself, resulting a very weathered person. Maybe the look is heightened. Maybe the wig doesn’t always bring its A-game. We reward jarring makeovers of actors all the time – Rami Malek took home a best actor Oscar the following year in spite of those oft discussed teeth. Kusama has pointed out that in the film, there’s always a question of how much the disrespect Bell encounters has to do with her being a woman, which also feels like a question that can be applied to these kinds of criticisms of the movie. Let’s move on.
Bell feels like such a collaborative effort between a director who understands the drive of a wounded woman, and an actor who can readily sink into that difficult headspace. I’m not someone who rewatches a lot of movies, but I’ve rewatched this one a lot and I still take new things away from Kidman’s performance this many times in. The connections between her past and present self become clearer, despite the difference 16 years makes in her appearance. It’s a great performance, and knowing that Kidman and Kusama had been looking for a chance to work together makes it all the more satisfying to me.
I showed my hand earlier, so you knew this was coming – I have to talk about Sebastian Stan as Chris, a character that a lesser film might have envisioned as the protagonist. Instead, he ends up in a position that women in the genre are often relegated to: the specter of lost love. This is a movie that really knows what it has in Stan. He’s fairly stoic and doesn’t have a lot of screen time, but he makes the impression he needs to. I’m reminded of what was so good about him in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. He had to telegraph a lot through a mask, which he also has to do at a pivotal point in this film, and you get so much determination and underlying vulnerability just through his eyes.
The various threads of intimacy connecting Bell to Chris, to the rest of the gang, and to Shelby (Jade Pettyjohn), her daughter, are a great strength of the story. Going back to that audience comment, I think one of the most obvious reasons Destroyer doesn’t work if you just swap Kidman out for some guy is Bell’s relationships with Petra (Tatiana Maslany, another actor who is always tremendous) and Shelby. She can sympathize with Petra for her choice to remain a part of Silas’s crew, because she knows the ways in which she’d been taken advantage of by the men in her father’s life, like DiFranco (played by Bradley Whitford, one of the many great small performances in the movie). In the present, Bell is actively having to deal with her 16 year old daughter being on the arm of a sleazy 20-something guy, a dynamic that is rightfully never, ever let off the hook. We get very little of Bell’s own backstory, but the way she interacts with these people suggests a deep disdain for men who take advantage of young women, a disdain that could come from her own personal experiences, or simply from just being a woman in the world, seeing it happen over and over again. That’s such a critical piece of her character. As it was put in the writers commentary with Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi, Bell isn’t immoral or amoral. She knows right and wrong, and her downfall is knowingly making that wrong call all those years ago.
It’s both true that Bell doesn’t know how to show up for her daughter, but also that everything she does is ultimately for her. Their final conversation is a masterpiece, and still makes me cry all these rewatches in. There’s drama in the dysfunction of their relationship, but then Shelby has this line about how Bell probably expects her to be grateful, because at least she didn’t have whatever upbringing Bell endured, which hits the nail on the head of something so real and relatable in a parent-child relationship. It’s hard for Shelby to sit across from the mother who hasn’t been what she’s needed and agree to do better, and it’s hard for Bell to sit across from the living proof of what she had and lost with Chris. Back during Bell’s confrontation with DiFranco, which his son witnesses, Bell asks him if he’s teaching his son to be a piece of shit like him. DiFranco says no, that he’s a good kid. It’s another one of those damning mirrors held up to Bell through her journey. She sees her anger in Shelby and doesn’t want that for her. It’s such a human ending for them, for Bell to own up to the anger that drives her, to really see her daughter, and to leave her with the only thing she has left to give: a fierce declaration of love.
There’s a structural twist to this movie that I won’t entirely spoil, but the moment I caught up to it upon first viewing is one of those moments I wish I could experience again for the first time. It’s not something that feels particularly complicated at first, but when you’ve rewatched this movie as much as I have, you really appreciate how much needed to be kept track of in order to weave the past with the present. Plenty of that is a credit to what Hay and Manfredi put on the page, but a ton of it is in Plummy Tucker’s editing too. Tension simmers throughout the film, and when it spikes, it does so in such effective, precise ways. Precision is a necessity in Kusama’s filmmaking, as she is often working with budgets and time constraints that she would call “aggressive.” The film’s biggest set piece is a bank shootout that took every bit of the two days they had to shoot it. For other pivotal scenes, like the roulette flashback that reveals Silas’s gleeful sociopathy and nearly takes Arturo’s life, all the coverage was done in one afternoon, and it’s cut together so effectively, you really fear for Arturo even though you know he’s alive in the present. The second heist scene, technically the first chronologically, cuts together the action inside and outside the bank along with another flashback to Bell and Chris making their plan in a way that’s still intelligible, and leaves you breathless. And then there’s the placement of the final flashback, which isn’t in chronological order with the rest of the scenes of the past, but it delivers such an impact that way. Think Diana in Wonder Woman, comprehending Steve Trevor’s final words to her after he’s already gone in. It’s perfectly devastating.
I could really go on and on, but the two things I can’t wrap this up without shouting out are the overall look of the film and the score. Back when I first saw this, I don’t think I realized a movie in this genre could be so visually compelling, but I’ve since learned that Kusama brings such an interesting eye to all her work, and I’ve also gone back and seen some of the films that inspired this one, like Klute. She worked closely with director of photography Julie Kirkwood on Destroyer to establish the look, and also often praises her location coordinator for finding such compelling places for them to shoot. As for the score, Theodore Shapiro began composing it based on the script before they even began shooting. There’s such a cool kind of darkness to his music, as well as an ecstatic hopefulness, especially toward the end. Listening to interviews and commentaries about this movie, it sounds like it was such a family affair, which I think allows for a film like this to be fully realized the way it was intended.
I have felt the need to become something of a defender of this movie. Like The Invitation, it demonstrates Kusama’s scrappiness, care for detail, and empathy for her characters, but it hasn’t been received the same respect. I want to be careful about attributing too much of criticism I disagree with to sexism, but as mentioned earlier, there’s always going to be that question. There was a Tweet a while back that suggested Destroyer would be on par with 1995’s Heat, if we showed a film with a female director and lead the same respect we show men. A lot of responses misunderstood this to mean Destroyer is a better film than Heat. I recently watched Heat for the first time, and I think they’re far too different to compare in that way, but I do believe we all have underlying biases that affect how we interact with art and media. Something I don’t think we talk about enough in terms of representation is how representation on screen and behind the camera makes forms and genres of media more accessible. It does me no good to have someone insist that films like Klute or Heat are “better” than Destroyer, because the fact of the matter is that I may not have gotten to Klute or Heat without Destroyer. I did enjoy both of those films, and they only deepened my appreciation for the one that got me there, for what it pays homage to, and what it does differently.
Destroyer is, in many ways, the future of this genre. There’s still something satisfying about a heist, and investigation, all those familiar beats, but there’s so much room for experimentation and so much worth challenging. I’ll leave you with this quote from the end of Kusama’s director commentary on Destroyer, which gets to the heart of its relevance and strengths:
“I think we’re in a time where we need to be watching people take responsibility for their mistakes and just say the words out loud, ‘I made a mistake, and I’m sorry.’ I think we live in this time when it almost seems impossible to see people in power do that, and I so desperately want that, that I kind of felt driven to make a movie like this, that goes to this length to investigate what it would mean to just be responsible to oneself, and to be open and accountable to one’s mistakes.”
Recommended Reading/Watching/Listening:
The Filmmaker Karyn Kusama Explores the Many Dimensions of Women’s Rage - The New York Times Magazine
Karyn Kusama Talks Destroyer - The Witching Hour
Destroyer with Karyn Kusama and Christopher Nolan - The Director’s Cut: A DGA Podcast