Anchor Bay Abducts ‘Alice Creed’

I would have wanted to have seen J Blakeson’s feature debut, The Disappearance Of Alice Creed at the Toronto Film Festival last September, the role reversal kidnapping thriller starring Gemma Arteton pitted against the excellent Eddie Marsan and Martin Compston (Sweet Sixteen, A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints and Red Road), but my schedule didn’t allow for an extra screening. 

In Screen Daily’s review, they mention that the tension build up between the characters is close in tone to Danny Boyle’s Shallow Grave. U.S audiences will get an op to see the film, not sure if Anchor Bay plans a theatrical release, but let’s hope so. On the same subject matter, I would strongly suggest a pic I saw at Cannes this year, Michel Franco’s Daniel y Ana which spends very little time with the kidnapping itself, but sends its young protagonists into some extremely difficult post-trauma terrain.

The pic begins on a suburban street, where two masked men (played by Marsan and Compston) seize a young woman (Arterton). They bind and gag her and take her to an abandoned, soundproofed apartment. She is Alice Creed, daughter of a millionaire. Her kidnappers, the coldly efficient Vic and his younger accomplice Danny, have worked out a meticulous plan. But Alice is not going to play the perfect victim – she’s not giving in without a fight. In a tense power-play of greed, duplicity and survival we discover that sometimes disappearances can be deceptive.