Payback is a bitch! And that’s the case for Rachel (Helen Mirren) whose daughter has just written a book about her mother’s Nazi-related life. We aren’t sure what’s up, but the tell-all knife scar on Mirren’s cheek says there was some monkey business here. Her ex husband, Stephan (Tom Wilkinson) shows up in a wheelchair to the book signing, and a man named David (Ciaran Hinds) is about to commit suicide. And this is where the love triangle begins, though not really, since the film does a very successful back and forth from present day 1997 to Israel, 1966 when Rachel was young (Jessica Chastain) and proving herself to Stephan (Marton Csokas) and David (Sam Worthington) deeply torn between the two men and the fears that surround her.
Their mission was to kidnap and deliver – for trial – and in order to kill him, Dieter Vogel (Jesper Christensen) a former Nazi Doctor who committed hundreds of murders and crimes, now posing as Rachel’s concerned Obstetrician. The film works because of the director John Shakespeare in Love Madden. It’s truly a marriage of actor and director (and yes, the screenplay is good, but this somehow isn’t about the script. It’s about the way the visuals are delivered.) Madden’s detailed camera work, his suspense, his teasing moments slowly unleashed with little surprise endings…every scene of their mission ticks to a pulse-raise heart attack. While the movie is reminiscent of a lighter note MUNICH it also feels a bit like a small film Birthday Girl and a bit like Silence of the Lambs, when their psycho-killer spits out gentle comments to play mind games with the three of them. For “Thirty years you’ve been taking the credit for something you didn’t do,” says Wilkinson to Mirren, and this is her debt. Three a half tiaras