Closet Land

Radha Bharadwaj's 1991 debut takes place in a single room in an unnamed police state, with only two actors. A young writer of children's books is taken from her home and interrogated, accused of hiding political messages in her stories. The relationship between the interrogator played by Alan Rickman and the writer played by Madeleine Stowe moves, over the hours, from violence to manipulation and then to a counterfeit intimacy. Bharadwaj wrote the film out of her connection to Amnesty International, but objected to the Amnesty quotation appended at the end; she wanted the story read as metaphor rather than as political genre. That it was produced by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer is a surprising pairing given the subject. Its theatrical structure and Rickman's performance are what carry it. Who it's for: viewers interested in films about torture, authoritarian regimes and single-room drama. Who it's not for: anyone avoiding scenes of psychological and physical torture, or who will find a structure closer to theatre than cinema confining.