saying: "After Stowe's last blindfold is removed, she incandesces in her own enlightenment. Emerging, through a kind of birth canal, from her uterine hell, she simply leaves Rickman, now a superfluous projection, behind." Alan Rickman later commented on the mixed reception in an interview when journalist Diane Solway brought up the poor reception, as she called it "a chilling two-character film" that is "reminiscent of Kafka's The Trial but not nearly so effective." Responding to this, he noted that the final cut of the film might have been too harsh: "When we were making the film, I thought, 'This could be too relentless.' I mean, there wasn't a single joke in it." Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat commented on the film's themes, noting: "Radha Bharadwaj not only plumbs the totalitarian mind but also the roles of abuser and victim — powerful male and oppressed woman."TV Guide was more positive and gave the film three out of four stars, saying: Despite Alan Rickman's bravura performance, Closet Land...is an overly theatrical analysis of police state repression ... Despite a splendid performance by Rickman, who can be intellectually cool, diffident or cruel, [the film] suffers from far too much artistic atmosphere ... The writer, as portrayed by Madeline Stowe, may be a trifle too heroic, especially since all the factual writings about police-state methods since Arthur Koestler and George Orwell emphasize that, given unlimited time and methods, nobody can last. It is the interrogator who emerges as the more interesting of the pair, particularly with the hints of his past. The basic analogy about child molestation seems strained; the scant difference in their years suggests that it is not the same man. Still, Closet Land does have a certain fascination as a piece of theater and an intellectual exercise on a pressing political issue. Bob Mielke, Ph.D, Professor of English at Truman State University, wrote positively of the film in 2014 in an online analytical essay, calling it "a subgenre of the German Kammerspiel or 'chamber-drama' film," saying: And one of the most powerful visual sleights of hand in Closet Land itself is when, to torturer Alan Rickman's voice-over, we see shots of "innocent" children reconfigured with the uncropped image to show a child greeting Hitler, one at a Ku Klux Klan rally and a young gun-toting terrorist. By sheer serendipity, my initial encounter with Bharadwaj's work illustrates one of her major thematic