Movie Review – Rupture

When you combine the director of Secretary (2002) and the writer of Hard Candy (2005) and 30 Days of Night (2007), you’re really expecting something dark and toothsome and dare I say it – scary. RUPTURE (2016) is none of those things.
Renee (Noomi Rapace) is a divorced mom with a garbage ex-husband and a son who’s acting out, but it’s all good because she’s going sky-diving and everything is about to be cool. When she’s captured by a group of indeterminant origin and funding, she spends the rest of the movie trying to escape the worst secure facility ever repurposed from an abandoned warehouse. The group is trying to provoke a fear response to force an evolution in her body. To what is unclear, because why muddle a movie with details. Everything you need to know about the next 92 minutes is poorly foreshadowed in the first 5. Renee is afraid of spiders. Renee has a utility knife in her pocket. Renee is resourceful. Her captors are compassionate but short on explanation. It’s one expansive experiment in fear, but it’s not nearly enough to save this plodding tale that’s heavy on torture and light on an actual story. The filmmakers have heard about movies like Saw (2004) and Hostel (2005), but didn’t want to actually make a movie like any of that genre’s best examples of edgy horror. Instead it’s a lot like being in a video game where your character just walks around, collects items but can’t leave the level.
It’s not enough to give us Peter Stormare, who has nothing to do but look menacing and growl some dialogue. He did that with actual character development in John Wick (2017) – you should stream that instead. It’s not enough to watch Noomi Rapace look sweaty and be resourceful. She did that with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009) – you should stream that instead. It’s not enough to see bad CGI used with little context. You can binge watch Grimm on Netflix – you should stream that instead.
This movie has great ideas that in the right hands of a competent screenwriter and director, would coalesce into a gripping sci-fi tale that would look very much like the offspring of The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981) and Species (1995). Steven Shainberg and Brian Nelson should have been that director and screenwriter, and they were, but there’s a reason this movie went straight to VOD in April. That reason is it’s not very good.
RUPTURE is currently unrated, but depicts scenes of intense phobias like spiders, has swears, and lots of off and on camera screaming. If it goes before the Board, it’ll likely get an R Rating, or be cut to an even more flaccid PG-13. It is streaming in Google Play Movies, Amazon Video, iTunes, Vudu, and YouTube.
Note: this movie actually ends at the 93 minute mark with nearly ten minutes of closing credits with no mid- or post credit scenes. It’s another level of torture you probably weren’t counting on.