Closet Land is... something else. It's a movie about an interrogation, and one that ends on a note of a "message" (brought to you by Amnesty International, which is well intentioned but not the right note at the end of all of this). Up until then, it's an absolutely riveting display of acting prowess and technical marvel-work. Its bizarre execution comes from somewhere primal, somewhere from a filmmaker who wants to take you to some place that is rather unrelenting and sad about the human condition, where we put ourselves in a place we can't get out of - and, sometimes, how we can find a way to make it through, bit by bit.
It's like if Kafka had to do a remake of Saw and use nothing but politics. Oh, and cast Alan Rickman instead of Jigsaw and make it about a woman who writes children's stories and is accused of writing subversive literature hidden in her latest story 'Closet Land'... come to think of it, that's nothing like Saw at all (save for the bits of torture, which, gracefully, are kept at a distance).
Two things are striking here: the sets and lighting, and the performances (maybe that's three, who cares). It's a showcase for Bill Pope, later the mastermind behind lighting The Matrix, to really make this a claustrophobic but somehow baroque room the characters are in. We rarely leave it, save for those few flashes where Madeline Stowe imagines herself away with her creations, so the photographer has to come up with new ways to show us these people, in this very strange and oppressive environment. The other thing is the acting. If you ever want to look up 'underrated', here's the place.
In fact, I would make a bold statement: this is Alan Rickman at his very best. He's so good here because he makes this character unlikeable but hard to pin down. Is he a really bad person, or is he just crazy? Does he really believe what he's saying, as he breaks this woman, or does he mean it when he says "They're watching me, too", when talking to Madeline Stowe's children's writer. We get glimpses of his character's life before all of this madness. but it's hard to see how that informs the macabre, pitch-black comedy of when we wee him as the "other guard" when Stowe is blindfolded, cavorting and contorting around the room like a madman. He gets to go to town, and is sinister, subtle, even warm, and when he gets mad, you can feel it. Stowe, on the other hand, is given a more challenging task playing the victim, always on the alert but strong because of her own 'Closet Land' she developed as a child, not as any kind of political statement.
I believed both actors in the roles, no matter how horrifying things got, and the film-making is just direct and absorbing. There's a lot of dialog that they have to cover here, but it's never boring or slight. And, oddly enough, I don't think it would've worked as a play unless it was restructured or if things were cut out a bit. It is, for all of its 'wordyness', a cinematic piece, shot on a specific-film set, and given a musical score that, unless I was mistaken, sounded a helluva lot like Philip Glass (it says Richard Einhorn, but who cares). It's ultimately 'that' movie that you have to tell your friends about, since they probably never heard of it until you came across it on, say, Rickman's IMDb page. Among a small group of people, I imagine, it's one of the great little-seen films of the past twenty-five years: intelligent, provocative, adult film-making.
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