Oscar Isaac stars as a New Yorker whose business – selling oil – is threatened by corruption and violence. Jessica Chastain plays his tough wife – a complex, brilliantly drawn character, whose father has a dubious criminal background.
It has a Martin Scorsese feel and the choice of urban locations is superb. The title doesn’t quite work, though, as it could be applied to countless other thrillers.
Directed by Tate Taylor, this film is adapted from the popular 2009 novel by Kathryn Stockett. Despite good storytelling and some remarkable performances by Emma Stone, Viola Davis and Viola Davis, it’s sentimental and simplistic. There’s also an unfortunate “white saviour” aspect. Given the importance of the Civil Rights movement, you wish there had been a more nuanced and subtle treatment of the topic.
Early on it detours into a history of life on Earth (perhaps influenced by 2001), showing dinosaurs and the meteorite that forced their extinction. It then returns to the story of the family. Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain play the parents of three boys, while Sean Penn plays one of those boys as an adult in the present day and struggling to come to terms with his past.
There are so many impressionistic elements that you’re often unsure what to think and what, if anything, is actually happening in narrative terms. That can be frustrating if you are expecting anything close to a regular drama. Indeed, the dinosaur segment borders on the ludicrous.
If the job of the film is to take you on an emotional journey, then it’s too muddled to succeed. But if you embrace the sheer ambition of the project – in terms of its visuals, music, editing techniques and production – it’s unlike anything else you will see.
It’s a powerful and moving story – especially given that it’s based on real events. Chastain is superb, as is Daniel Brühl as Lutz Heck, Hitler's chief zoologist, who develops an uneasy connection with Antonina.
It’s unbearably tense in places and harrowing in others.
In 1965, three young Mossad agents attempt to capture a Nazi war criminal called Dieter Vogel. Their plans go wrong and he escapes. The agents choose to give a false account of what happened and live with that lie permanently. That is, until Vogel shows up 30 years later and their deception risks being exposed.
This is an excellent drama that successfully tells parallel stories separated by three decades. It’s centred on Rachel, who is believably played by Jessica Chastain in the 1960s scenes and Helen Mirren in the 1990s sequences. Sam Worthington and Ciarán Hinds both play David Peretz, while Marton Csokas and Tom Wilkinson both play Stefan Gold.
Jesper Christensen is suitably creepy as the so-called “Surgeon of Birkenau”.
The Debt asks deep questions about morality, and the plot is pleasingly unpredictable. It's scary, too.
