Gillian Anderson and Danny Dyer star in this rather gruesome revenge thriller from Britain. If you’re from the UK, you might have seen this movie under the title Straightheads; it got changed to Closure for the US release and as bad a title as Closure is, I have to say Straightheads is quite a bit worse. Anyway, Anderson is an icy businesswoman who picks up Danny Dyer’s character, a working class stiff about twenty years her junior, because she needs a date to a swanky party and she’s kind of an alpha like that. Unfortunately, after the party, at a large estate in the country, they run afoul of a trio of psychotic country bumpkins who beat Dyer’s character so badly he loses an eye and rape Anderson’s character. The film then becomes about how this pair of basically decent people find themselves drawn into a bloody revenge plot when Anderson randomly encounters one of the rapists later. Gillian Anderson’s performance is really the only reason to check out this movie in my opinion and, honestly, I’m don’t think even that is worth slogging through this movie’s nastiness. The rape-revenge movie is a genre I’m not exactly a huge fan of, but I’ve seen a couple that were pretty good, most notably the simply titled Revenge, a quite extreme French movie from 2017, and Jennifer Kent’s really gripping movie The Nightingale. But with a plot this standard, you want a movie to bring something new to the table and this one really doesn’t and, even at a mercifully brief eighty minutes, this movie feels grimy and unpleasant and tiring. It’s not horrifying, which would be fine, nor am I a prude about this kind of thing; the movie is just unpleasant and gross. I will admit that the fate of one of the rapists is genuinely something I’d never seen before in a movie (and, frankly, hope I never see again). I mean, kudos for getting really awful and then just kicking it up a notch and just going there. I guess. PM me if you want to know. (Spoiler: you don’t.) And look for a pre-stardom Gugu Mbatha-Raw in a one-line role as Young PA. But, really, don’t watch this. I’m a huge fan of Anderson as a performer and her performance is much better than this movie deserves. But even with that one excellent element, this one just doesn’t justify itself. 2 stars.
tl;dr – nasty rape-revenge thriller doesn’t bring anything interesting or new to predictable plot; Gillian Anderson’s excellent performance can’t even save this one. 2 stars.