Rupture (2017)
Starring Noomi Rapace, Peter Stormare, Michael Chiklis, Kerry Bishé, Lesley Manville, Ari Millen
Directed by Steven Shainberg
Rupture sets the scene by showing recently divorced mom Renee (Rapace) on a typical morning which winds up being anything but a typical day.
Renee and her ex share custody of their 13-year-old son, Evan (Percy Hynes White). Evan is a typical kid (he hates doing his homework), but sometimes he has to step in as man of the house (mom is deathly afraid of spiders and so he has to catch-and-release them). When we meet the pair, it’s time for Evan to spend the weekend with his father – leaving Renee conveniently alone.
Before she leaves the house to drive Evan to his dad’s, we see a mysterious person rigging a tire on her car to rupture… which it eventually does. She finds herself on a lonely road, but luckily there’s a truck driver who stops to help. Or maybe not. Renee is bound, gagged, and driven away in a truck to an imposing compound.
After enduring intense and very strange interrogations and examinations, Renee soon discovers that she is now the subject of an underground experiment – and her arachnophobia factors in. Her creepy captors (Chiklis, Stormare, Bishé, and Manville) coldly explain to her that she has a genetic abnormality that can potentially allow her to “rupture” her DNA to reveal a superhuman nature. Renee doesn’t want to be superhuman. She just wants to get back to her son. Renee knows that she must find a way to escape before it is too late.
Finding a way to escape is mostly how Rupture spends its slightly over-long running time: Renee running. There’s also Renee asking why they’re doing this to her, Renee being terrorized by spiders, and then Renee running some more. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, thanks to Rapace’s screen presence and her innate ability to keep you rooting for her in spite of the redundancy of the slim storyline. Director Steven Shainberg (Secretary) and screenwriter Brian Nelson (Hard Candy) should have made for a combustible team, packing emotional heft, sizzling dialogue, and edgy envelope-pushing into this claustrophobic thriller; but they don’t ever really deliver on their promise.
One part Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs, one part Whitley Strieber’s Communion, this sci-fi horror flick is worth one watch but not two.
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Film
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