Close (2019)

Warning: Vague spoilers about the film’s ending ahead!

Sam Carlson (Noomi Rapace) is a bodyguard who apparently typically works in war zones. She grudgingly (though I suspect she does everything grudgingly) takes the job of protecting poor little rich girl Zoe (Sophie Nélisse) for a week of London nightlife and then transport her to a safe house belonging to Zoe’s mother Rima (Indira Varma) in the desert near Morocco. Zoe’s father has just died, and she has – very much to the surprise and anger of her mother – inherited a considerable amount of shares in her mother’s and father’s company, so she would make a lucrative target for kidnappers.

After their arrival at the house, in Sam’s last night on the job, they are attacked by a well-armed group of men who know suspiciously much about the place’s security system. Sam saves Zoe, and they both end in the hands of the police. Alas, these cops are clearly on someone’s payroll, and Zoe kills one of them while Sam is putting two others down rather less lethally. So, now the two are going on the run together. And yes, of course, the shared experience will see Sam not only killing quite a few people but also working through her relationship with her own daughter and her trouble with opening up to people, and Zoe will learn valuable lessons, too. Yawn.

Yes, yes, I know, the writers of Hollywood thrillers and action movies are bound by some kind of eternal law to always include this sort of “emotional grounding” in their scripts, but it’s such a been-there, done-that sort of thing I’d actually be all too happy to encounter a film whose heroine is saving the rich teenager because she’s a decent human being instead because of some vague psychological connection to a daughter. And since neither Sam nor the audience ever actually gets to meet her daughter, this so-called emotional core is particularly weak; who cares about a characters relationship to some off-screen name? It’s all very perfunctory and exactly how you’d expect it, and also absolutely unnecessary.

The film’s case when it comes to its supposed emotional core isn’t exactly helped by Zoe being a particularly boring example of the poor rich girl type, with little personality showing, and therefore little weight to Sam’s and her growing connection. Which wouldn’t be much of a problem if the film weren’t hell-bent on foregrounding this stuff, putting the time in but not the actual writing work necessary to keep the relationship interesting.


The film’s other big script problem is how often it cuts back to the villains of the piece, destroying every bit of tension director Vicky Jewison’s often deft handling of the action business has managed to build up despite the general weakness of her and Rupert Whitaker’s script. For most of the film’s running time, I was rather puzzled why we spend so much time with Indira Varma’s character. After all, the parts of her scenes actually useful for the rest of the plot could have been handled in one cell phone conversation. In the end, it turns out the film ruins its pacing and drags its audience through badly written business meetings to prepare a last act plot revelation regarding the true identity of the villain. Too bad that change only makes even the tiny bit of sense it does make because these draggy scenes were indeed meant to be cleverly ambiguous instead of tedious and vague – if only they actually were. Also, replacing the evil mother trope with the one about evil Chinese corporations isn’t exactly exciting.