Rupture

Director Steven Shainberg has made a name for himself with films that have pushed boundaries while offering strong female characters at the center of his stories – see Maggie Gyllenhaal in “Secretary” and Nicole Kidman in “Fur”. In “Rupture”, the complex female character is there, but the arthouse style has made place for something more sinister, which most critics have bemoaned as “torture porn”. Shainberg liked the theme of “transformation and personal confrontation of who one is and to a larger extent the movement through what you’re afraid of to a positive new realization”.

[Rapace] and I had developed a friendship over another movie that Andrew Lazar and I had been trying to make for a while called The Big Shoe. Rapace had wanted to play one of the parts in the film and on the basis of that we developed a good rapport. I couldn’t have found anyone better for Rupture than Noomi. She has the intelligence, the physicality, and the simple capacity to be in the experience. It’s such an intense role that I was worried about what it would be like at lunchtime and how she’d get through the day, but her level of drive and intensity is just astonishing. (Steven Shainberg, Film International, May 16, 2017)

Rapace plays a single mother who gets abducted for a reason unbeknownst to her. In a remote underground lab, she undergoes severe and traumatic experimentation from a mysterious bunch of lab-coated “doctors.” Their goal? To make her defeat her worst fears. In the film, she is supported by a rather eclectic cast that includes Michael Chiklis, Peter Stormare and esteemed theatre actress Lesley Manville, who would be Oscar-nominated a few years later for “Phantom Thread”.

“Rupture” went straight-to-streaming in November 2016 and faced some rather harsh reviews from critics. Variety wrote, that “this is a plot that feels lazily reverse-engineered from a collection of disparate, pre-existing scenes and elements, rather like one of those cooking shows where contestants are given a selection of random ingredients and forced to come up with a meal”. And Slant Magazine wrote, “Rupture is driven by nothing except its big reveal, which leaves us twiddling our thumbs along with Renee for much of the running time, as she wanders requisite human-size ventilation shafts and asks questions that her tormentors are too coy and pretentious to answer. When she’s finally granted her explanation, you understand why the villains were so un-forthcoming.”