lack of a proper setting for the film, an unnamed police state, saying: "Right off, the filmmaker lets us off the hook, making it easy to reject the incessant cruelty we witness as artificial." Confused about the film's lack of focus on a single theme, he added: "In any event, this bit of Freudianism put in the service of protesting child abuse overloads and sidetracks the film from its main purpose of protesting all human rights violations." He finally concluded by praising Madeleine Stowe's performance, noting that she "is actually quite moving in her unshakable dignity." On the other hand, he was more critical of Alan Rickman's delivery, noting that "Rickman, whose diction often seems muddled, is needlessly, hissably arch." Radha Bharadwaj responded to some of the criticism in her own review, particularly to Kevin Thomas, titled "The Real Message of 'Closet Land,'" explaining that it "doesn't attempt to literally depict the physical reality of political interrogation. I'm more intrigued by the psychological experience: the disorientation, the absurdity, the terror. That's why Closet Land unfolds in a Kafka-esque environment grounded more in nightmare logic than gritty reality. A number of torture victims have told me that Closet Land truly captures the psychological reality of their experience. Amnesty International has strongly supported the film. If Closet Land had been 'pretentious,' the former victims who so strongly identify with the film would have been able to smell it a mile away. And they would certainly never have responded to a movie that degraded their harrowing life experience to the level of 'porno chic.'" She added: I am not, as [Thomas'] simplistic analysis would have it, trying to mix a 'protest' of child abuse with a 'protest' of political abuse ... all forms of aggression are organically linked. Most who have grown up in the sheltered West have no direct experience with the pathology of political abuse and consider it alien. By likening political abuse to something more accessible to Westerners, child abuse, I can give people a better feel for the paternalistic power dynamics of political abuse. Defending the ambiguous police state setting, she concluded: Thomas would no doubt have me set the film in El Salvador or some other politically correct target so that Western viewers could all sneer at how rotten things are in the Third World. It's probably because Closet Land isn't safely placed in someone else's territory that