Blue Ruin

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.