The Disappearance of Alice Creed

Two ex-convicts, Danny and Vic, prepare an empty English flat so that it can serve as a prison, lining a van with plastic and fitting the room with a bed and a reinforced door. Their plan is to kidnap Alice Creed, the daughter of a wealthy businessman, and hold her for a ransom. What begins as a carefully organised crime soon becomes far more complicated than either man expected, as captors and captive are drawn into a shifting struggle over money and control.

The Disappearance of Alice Creed was released in 2009 and is the feature debut of writer-director J Blakeson, who also wrote the screenplay. It precedes his later films The 5th Wave and I Care a Lot. The three central roles are played by Gemma Arterton as Alice, Martin Compston as Danny and Eddie Marsan as Vic, with an unusually small credited crew behind the production.

On IMDb the film holds a rating of 6.7 from roughly 28,000 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 6.5 from a much smaller number of votes. A critics' rating of 7 out of 10 from around 100 reviews places it slightly above the audience scores, suggesting a warmer response from reviewers than from the general viewing public.