A different Nicole Kidman stares out at us under the harsh Los Angeles sun of the neo-noir “Destroyer.”
The actress who famously donned a prosthetic nose for “The Hours” has here gone to greater and grittier lengths of transformation. Her eyes are sunken. Her skin is hardened. Her stare is provocatively hollow. She looks dead inside — nearly so on the outside, too.
Such metamorphoses have long been standbys of Oscar seasons both past (Charlize Theron in “Monster”) and present (Christian Bale in “Vice”). “Nearly” unrecognizable is the goal, not actually disappearing. The point isn’t to forget who you’re watching, it’s to impress upon you the masterful changeability of the actor beneath all the makeup and wig.
Karyn Kusama’s “Destroyer” presses a little too much, in both Kidman’s showily chameleonic performance and in the relentlessly grim and fragmented tale of a hardboiled L.A. detective haunted by a trauma from her past. But while “Destroyer” can be overwrought and mechanical, it’s an often gripping, well-crafted crime drama with distinction of its own in the genre, an almost always male-dominated one.