“Blue Ruin” is a stunner, a violence-filled indie film that veers close to the Coen brothers’ early masterpiece “Blood Simple” and brings to mind the B-movie convention-twisting work of Quentin Tarantino as it adds fresh detail and a thoroughly convincing character to its revenge tale.
The picture is written, directed and shot by Jeremy Saulnier, who cast his longtime friend Macon Blair as Dwight, the man at the center of the story.
We first see Dwight in a bathtub, seemingly at home. But when a car pulls up, he bolts out the window. He has broken into the house and has to flee back to the Delaware beach where he lives in his car, tucked behind the dunes.
Bearded, disheveled and Dumpster diving outside an amusement park to eat and selling aluminum cans to get a little cash, Dwight appears simply to be a bum. But when a kindly cop takes him into the station to give him a newspaper, his story begins to reveal itself.
A murderer, who somehow hurt Dwight, is being released from prison. So he puts the battery back in his old car, steals a gun, which he subsequently breaks, and heads to Virginia to get his revenge.
Before long, he is viciously wielding a knife, fortifying a house, throwing bodies in the car trunk and blasting away with a shotgun. But Dwight is no Hollywood vigilante hero. He’s bumbling, nervous, psychologically damaged and nearly unable to communicate.
But he’s smart enough to know that his actions have endangered his sister and her two children. And, as his battle against the murderer and his extended family escalates, Dwight must risk his own life — repeatedly — while trying to keep them out of harm’s way.
Blair, who is on screen in every scene of the picture, gives a tremendous performance, conveying Dwight’s internal upheaval through his eyes and mannerism as much as through the dialogue.
In fact, the first 20 minutes of the movie is almost word free. That puts it squarely in the art film world. But Saulnier doesn’t conform to indie film convention, either.
Instead, when Dwight goes on the move, the picture comes grittily alive with blood on bathroom floors and gushing out of his hand, pitchforks employed as a weapon, gory self-surgery, an escape from the hospital and, of course, a final shootout.
Along the way, however, Saulnier and Blair touch on the nature of homelessness, the impact of trauma on a family, decades-old friendships and a kind of confused courage. That gives “Blue Ruin” a depth that transcends the revenge film genre even as the movie realistically enlivens it.
