Blue Ruin | Little White Lies

Blue Ruin

01 May 2014 / Released: 02 May 2014

A man with long hair and a beard, covered in blood, standing next to a car in a rural setting.
A man with long hair and a beard, covered in blood, standing next to a car in a rural setting.
4

Anticipation.

A reinvention of the revenge genre, apparently.

3

Enjoyment.

No it isn’t, despite great sequences.

3

In Retrospect.

Macon Blair’s eyes burn through an unconvincing plot.

This hard-boiled, uniron­ic revenge thriller is held togeth­er by a mes­meris­ing lead per­for­mance from Macon Blair.

We meet Dwight (Macon Blair) when he is down and out, liv­ing in his car and sport­ing a dirty wife-beat­er and a wild-man beard. The only fea­tures to dis­tin­guish him from anony­mous hobo sta­tus are eyes so large they seem wrenched open in horror.

These brown pools snap open as a female police offi­cer raps on his car win­dow, wak­ing him from his after­noon slum­ber. These brown pools stand in for a ver­bal reac­tion when the offi­cer sym­pa­thet­i­cal­ly breaks the news that a dou­ble mur­der­er named Will Cle­land has been released from jail. These brown pools sug­gest emo­tion­al moti­va­tion as he buys a map of Vir­ginia and take his bat­tered exis­tence on the road.

The deci­sion by direc­tor Jere­my Saulnier to set up his premise and intro­duce his lead char­ac­ter with min­i­mal expo­si­tion is a bold and bril­liant one. A vagrant, a freed and vio­lent ex-con and a desire for revenge are the strik­ing and salient facts. Saulnier, also with his DoP hat on, con­tin­ues to let the men­ace build as his hero takes a wind­ing car trip through the Amer­i­can wilderness.

The cam­era swings around curves in the road, tak­ing in trees and pro­vid­ing space in which the audi­ence can brace them­selves for con­flict. We know it’s going to be messy but how messy exact­ly? As ever the indi­vid­ual imag­i­na­tion can be trust­ed to take a few clues and con­ceive of bar­bar­ic things.

The sub­se­quent two-thirds of the film can nev­er quite match the dis­tinc­tive mood estab­lished in the ear­ly and enig­mat­ic seg­ments. Once the vio­lence gets going the ter­rain feels — despite the out­pour­ings of the crit­i­cal hive mind — like a stan­dard-issue, shoot-to-sur­vive, out-of-con­trol hor­ror nasty.

A stand out scene comes in the form of a ter­ri­fy­ing home-under-siege set-up that plays like a stealth­i­er and thus more skin-crawl­ing Straw Dogs. Dwight, who it turns out is a bit of an ama­teur at blood sports, bor­rows tac­tics from the Home Alone school of DIY sur­vival. It’s fit­ting, there­fore, that a grown-up Buzz McCal­lis­ter shows up to play Dwight’s old- school friend, Ben (Devin Ratray), a met­aller as cheer­ful shoot­ing the breeze about old times as he is about show­ing off his firearms col­lec­tion. His con­tri­bu­tions are a com­ic joy, as ener­getic and amus­ing as the rest of the film is poised and serious.

Blair excels at con­vey­ing a high­ly spe­cial­ist form of despair as Dwight, who after a shave and out­fit change shuf­fles around like an unhap­py office stooge com­pelled to vio­lence by an aber­ra­tion of des­tiny. There is a dis­con­nect between his orig­i­nal char­ac­ter and the rote vil­lains (a fam­i­ly of revolt­ing hicks any­one?) that reflects the mar­riage between orig­i­nal­i­ty and banal­i­ty in the film as a whole.

You might like

Accessibility Settings

Text

Applies the Open Dyslexic font, designed to improve readability for individuals with dyslexia.

Applies a more readable font throughout the website, improving readability.

Underlines links throughout the website, making them easier to distinguish.

Adjusts the font size for improved readability.

Visuals

Reduces animations and disables autoplaying videos across the website, reducing distractions and improving focus.

Reduces the colour saturation throughout the website to create a more soothing visual experience.

Increases the contrast of elements on the website, making text and interface elements easier to distinguish.