Angel of Mine is a 2019 thriller about a woman grieving over the death of her daughter, who loses grip of reality when she begins to think her girl may still be alive.
Things start right off badly for Lizzie (Noomi Rapace), a counter cosmetic sales girl recently divorced from Mike (Luke Evans), which already has her reeling, but when he drop off their young son Thomas (Finn Little) and serves her papers for full custody, it comes as a big surprise. Maybe it shouldn’t. He tells her Thomas can see her dark side, and so do we. At a birthday party soon after, she spots young Lola (Annika Whiteley), daughter to Claire (Yvonne Strahovski) and her husband ((Richard Roxburgh), believing the little girl is her own daughter, whom she lost as an infant a few years earlier. It soon consumes her, pushing her to make ever-increasingly poor decisions, spinning her further into that very darkness all see slowly enveloping her.
Any film that features Rapace in the cast begins and starts with her, she an actor of near fearless determination in crafting challenging characters that stay this side of the expected. No one can say she doesn’t bring passion to her performances, even if the movie she’s in might not parallel her efforts. Director Kim Farrant, working from a script by Luke Davis and David Regal doesn’t skip much setup, presenting Lizzie as being a little off balance in the opening moments, moving quickly into her spiral as he faces off with Mike and his legal documents on the streets. This is a story bound to its broken character right as we begin, and then layers it from there, and while its thinly built on a slew of contrived landmarks, is bolstered by Rapace, who knows how to bring the weight.
This all centers on Lizzie’s immediate, gripping sensation that little Lola is in fact her daughter, her obsession with that thought bleeding into nearly everything she does, even as she desperately tries to cobble together an exterior of sanity. She manipulates a meeting to ingratiate herself into Claire’s life, her deepening belief that what’s Claire’s is actually hers, genuinely beginning to break her. We witness a side of Lizzie that is rife with fantasy, making it hard for her (and sometimes us) to know what it real and what is not. And then there’s her attempts at dating, a sexual encounter leading to crushing moment of collapse that is handled very well.
A movie like this walks a thin line, toying with overdramatizing the real psychological damage on display, and sure, Farrant can’t seem to avoid some of the more notable clichés the genre comes packed with, yet still manages to string it all together with some authenticity, made more so by what Rapace burdens Lizzie with from the first frames. Angel of Mine is not without its flaws, the momentum sort of muted at times and a few neatly manufactured points that keep it feeling as if its being forced into corners it shouldn’t, but this is nonetheless a well made character study with a good ending that should invite some closer inspection.