Rupture review: A young mother (Noomi Rapace) is kidnapped and held captive by a strange group of people who are intent on making her ‘rupture’.
Rupture review, Kat Hughes, The Hollywood News.
Rupture review
Renee (Noomi Rapace) is a single mother riddled with fear. Estranged from the father of her son and trying to cope with her son’s outbursts, she is struggling. In an attempt to reinvent herself and conquer life, she decides to join a work colleague on a sky-dive. However, en-route to the jump she finds herself captured and bundled into the back of a van. When she awakens she finds herself strapped to a bed, the subject of a peculiar string of tests revolving around fear. Can Renee survive the tests and escape the facility, or will she ‘rupture’ as her captors hope?
In the past Rapace has been a name that you can trust. She broke into the mainstream after her turn as Lisbeth Salander in the original The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and has racked up an impressive resumé since, including starring in the likes of The Drop, Child 44 and Prometheus. She keeps with the science-fiction thriller theme in Rupture, but unfortunately it doesn’t really pay off for her.
Rupture review
A strange and intriguing premise, Rupture gets a little lost in the middle and struggles to tie events up. We start strong enough, the kidnapping sequence is well executed, but slowly things start to unravel. Once we enter the facility we are greeted with what feels like several paths which the film could go down. Oddly, it seems to venture partway down a couple before veering off in a completely different direction.
We get a tip-toe into torture porn territory as Renee and her fellow captives are inflicted with phobia-born torments. Arachnophobia sufferers might want to avert their eyes at this point; although bizarrely the spiders themselves are computer-generated. The fact that they aren’t real, dulls the fear levels. A scene involving a real snake does better but it is underused and once again the true fear factor is sadly lacking. We then proceed onto a game of cat and mouse as Renee tries to escape (with a quick toilet stop-off). Here the film gets interesting, Renee isn’t making the same choices that these characters usually make…until she decides to backtrack, making all the expected manoeuvres after all.
Rupture review
Disappointingly the ‘big’ reveal, though different, is not unexpected. Our story also continues on longer than strictly necessary. There’s a great opportunity for the action to stop, but we continue on for another couple of scenes which fell unneeded and only serve to weigh down the run-time.
Rapace is as engaging as she always is, and draws the viewer in. A big chunk of the film involves her either tied to a gurney or crawling around in vents, alone. The fact that she can hold the viewers attention during these solo moments highlights just how talented she is. Sadly she just doesn’t have a great deal to work with. It’s a similar situation for her co-stars Peter Stormare, Michael Chiklis and Ari Millen. All are usually fantastic in what they do, but here their characters aren’t developed or explored enough.
Given its strong cast and director (Steven Shainberg – Secretary), Rupture could and should have been so much better. Infuriatingly, rather than being a genre definer, it seems destined to be consumed and soon forgotten.
Rupture review by Kat Hughes, November 2016.
Rupture is released in selected UK cinemas and on digital platforms on Friday 4th November, 2016.
