Close (2019)

Vicky Jewson's Close arrives as a Netflix action thriller with a modest proposition: a close protection officer named Sam, played by Noomi Rapace, escorting an heiress through Casablanca after a kidnapping attempt goes sideways. The character is drawn from Jacquie Davis, a real female bodyguard whose clients included royalty and novelists, and the marketing leaned on that female-fronted framing. It is a legitimate inversion of a well-worn template, executed without a single speech about it. The film simply places a woman in the role and lets her break a man's wrist. That restraint is to its credit. Netflix acquired the finished product and released it quietly, which is where most of these exercises end up.

On representation, the cast is diverse in a manner that feels incidental to the setting. Middle Eastern and North African performers fill Moroccan roles, Arabic is spoken by characters who would plausibly speak it, and nobody turns to the camera to explain the significance. The villains are a mining conglomerate, which provides a flicker of corporate-greed villainy, though the screenplay treats phosphate deals as plot machinery instead of an indictment of late capitalism. Racial commentary is absent. This is Casablanca as a backdrop for fights, not a thesis.

Everything else is a flat line. No LGBTQ characters, no climate messaging, no body positivity, no neurodivergent figures, no historical revisionism. The film is contemporary, brisk, and interested chiefly in choreography. Critics found it predictable, and they are not wrong, but predictability is not sermonizing. It preaches nothing. It kills a man with a fishing hook and moves on, which in this taxonomy is a kind of purity. The film seems untroubled by its own meager standing on the social-consciousness ledger, and we should perhaps be untroubled on its behalf.