Deborah Ross

Face time | 24 January 2019

You don't see the character, only a deglamorised Kidman and that's what the film becomes about<span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span>

issue 26 January 2019

Destroyer is an LA noir starring Nicole Kidman ‘as you have never seen her before’. Her hair is terrible. Her eyes are red-rimmed with dark circles. Her lips are dry, flaking. Her skin is sun-damaged and liver-spotted. Her walk is a leaden shuffle. Just me on a regular day, in other words, but she is being hailed as ‘brave’, of course. This may or may not be so — I can only say that I went to the corner shop just now and Ahmet did not applaud me for leaving the house looking as I do or offer me an Oscar — but it is distracting. I don’t know what absorbed more of my attention, the story, her character, or just how bad she looks. Actually, I can answer that. How bad she looks.

She plays Erin Bell, an LAPD detective who we know is a wreck from the first shot, which shows her waking up in her car beneath a grimy underpass and opening those bleary, red-rimmed eyes.

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