As The Disappearance of Alice Creed begins,
we see the two male leads, Vic (Eddie Marsan) and Danny (Martin Compston, below-right with Marsan) steal a van from a
car park, then take a trip to buy a saw, a length of cord, a power drill and rolls of carpet underlay from B&Q.
They're building a prison in what was once a habitable room in a flat. However, they need a victim and make a
trap in the woods while attaching a red handkerchief to a tree. A quick trip to a furniture store to buy a bed
and assemble it, fix it to the floor, dressing it with a rubber undersheet and the room is complete. Change
the numberplate on the van and make the inside suitably-attired to hold someone, then put on security-guard-style
clothing and collect your victim...
We next see the pair bringing Alice Creed (Gemma Arteton, right) into the bedroom, strip her naked, tie her to the
bed and ball-gag her to stop her screaming. When this gets taken out later to allow her to drink water, she tells
them she needs to get back to her daughter, but they reply that they know everything about her... including the
fact that she doesn't have a daughter. The plan is to ransom her for £2million - but she must co-operate. Vic
tells her that he doesn't want to hurt her or kill her, but is prepared to do both if necessary.
The Disappearance of Alice Creed took a while for me to get into it, as it didn't really exhibit
enough tension that I was expecting from a hostage situation with two occasionally dissenting kidnappers. With
the knowledge that the pair met in prison, with Vic being the dominating one and Danny being the weak-willed one
who will go along with whatever Vic says, that was certainly believeable, but the whole movie only gelled in a
number of scenes and not throughout. This could possibly have been because the cast are well-known faces and
names and while this did have an original script, it felt like the kind of film that had previously been made
in a foreign country with people we'd never heard of, so we wouldn't have any pre-conceived ideas of how the
cast would behave.
However, the film does have a great deal going for it. All three of the cast turn in a decent performance,
and Eddie Marsan just *looks* evil, which helps his character. It also takes different turns
from the way you're expecting and therein lies the majority of the tension. This is also the
feature-length
directorial debut from J Blakeson and one of his talents lies in well-framed shots and making great use of
the full 2.35:1 widescreen frame, which is always pleasing to see.
Being released last year, it's a good job the DVD came out when it did, in October, as had it been released in
2011 following a story like the case with Joanna Yeates, anyone who reads the Daily Mail would have put two and
two together to come up with five and kicked up a stink as they often do. Note that I'm not saying anything about
the ultimate fate of Gemma Arteton's character, just equating the kidnap aspect.
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Presented in the original 2.35:1 theatrical ratio and being anamorphic, the picture doesn't have any problems other
than looking a little soft, as DVDs tend to when you watch so many Blu-rays, but it carries off well the grim
locations that are spread throughout the movie.
For the record, I'm watching on a Panasonic 37" Plasma screen, with the DVD upscaled via a Samsung BD-P1500 Blu-ray player.
