It being a British film, The Disappearance of Alice Creed features characters with impeccable manners, relatively speaking.
The kidnappers who snatch the title character, after all, always address her as "Miss Creed," even when they're holding a gun to her head or a knife to her throat. But their intent is deadly serious.
Written and directed by J Blakeson, Alice Creed is a wonderfully tense little exercise in the mathematics of three -- as in: How many different alliances, betrayals and conflicts can you extrapolate out of a gritty little crime story with only three characters?
Yet Blakeson never paints himself into a corner. You're guessing who will emerge victorious -- or even alive -- right up until the finale. It's taut, tight and not a little thrilling.
We initially only see two characters: Vic (Eddie Marsan) and Danny (Martin Compston), first glimpsed going through a deadpan routine of buying gear at a hardware emporium, then outfitting what looks like an apartment with foam-rubber-eggcrate wall coverings (for soundproofing, one assumes), a series of exceptionally solid locks, a brand-new mattress and box-spring and metal hasps, the kind police routinely hook prisoners in handcuffs to.
The next thing we see is the object of all this preparation: a young woman, her head in a cloth sack, struggling and making muffled noises against a ball-gag, being handcuffed to the bed (hand and foot), her clothes systematically snipped off her with scissors, replaced by a purple track suit. And then she's left alone, locked in the room in the dark.
She is Alice Creed (Gemma Arterton), and she is the daughter of someone wealthy. Danny and Vic have kidnapped her and now plan to ransom her for two million pounds. Which is where it gets interesting.
Unfortunately, I can't really reveal much more without spoiling the surprises that crop up just regularly enough to send the film careering in a new direction. Each new bit of information that Blakeson reveals recasts all that has come before in a new light and gives new shades of meaning to the action we are seeing.
Which puts much of the burden for selling this story to the actors, a capable trio with interestingly matched skills. The engine that drives the film is Marsan, a buzzing ball of intensity as Vic. Vic is a control freak, an ex-con with a plan and the steely will to follow it to the letter. Marsan is always a treat, an actor with a fierce attack whether in Mike Leigh's Happy Go Lucky or playing a Dickensian character in the BBC's brilliant Little Dorrit -- or even turning up as a hapless (and quickly, handless) villain in Hancock.
Compston plays his passive-aggressive partner, who carries most of the secrets in the film and lets them dribble out, sometimes willingly, sometimes not. He captures the sense of a man who knows just how many balls he's juggling, unsure whether he's up to the task -- and aware that his life hangs in the balance.
Arterton perfectly complements the other two as the victim, who is tougher and more resourceful than perhaps even she knows. It's a gutsy performance, wholly lacking in vanity, informed by a fierce will that her captors underestimate at their own peril.
The Disappearance of Alice Creed is edgy fun, a kind of miniaturist thriller that keeps its focus tight and its aim high. And it hits the bulls eye every time.