Occasionally, the national news will carry stories about a horrific local murder that took place in some part of the country where we don\u2019t live. And because it happened somewhere else, possibly far away from any major cities, maybe we make assumptions about the sorts of people who live there\u2014negative assumptions. We stop seeing these individuals as being like us\u2014instead, we view them as some kind of weird \u201cother.\u201d And so we turn off our empathy and count our blessings that we don\u2019t live wherever \u201cthere\u201d is.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s so striking about Blue Ruin is how writer-director Jeremy Saulnier both plays into those dismissive assumptions while also subverting them. His dark revenge tale flaunts its small-town strangeness, but it also keeps a sharp eye on the human beings at the story\u2019s center. Blue Ruin may occasionally be midnight-movie lurid, but not at the expense of deeper questions about vengeance\u2019s diminishing returns.<\/p>\n
When we first meet Dwight (Macon Blair), he\u2019s a bearded homeless man. Dwight seems disheveled and purposeless\u2014maybe even mentally ill\u2014but he soon learns that Will Cleland (David W. Thompson), a convicted murderer, has been released from prison. Promptly, Dwight travels to his Virginia childhood home to see Cleland, though not to welcome him back. As we quickly realize, it was Dwight\u2019s parents whom Cleland killed, and he\u2019s not willing to forgive the man even though he\u2019s served his time.<\/p>\n
In a different movie, Dwight\u2019s journey to avenge his parents\u2019 death would be the focal point. But in Blue Ruin, that business is dispensed with quickly: Dwight kills the guy in a bathroom nearby where Cleland\u2019s family is holding a reunion party.<\/p>\n
After that jarring opening, Saulnier (who also served as cinematographer) continues to upset our expectations. Done with his brutal deed, Dwight shaves off his beard and cleans up, revealing himself not to be the unhinged bum we first met but, rather, a relatively mild-mannered, doughy man who must now visit his estranged sister, Sam (Amy Hargreaves), to let her know what\u2019s happened. Plus, he has to warn her: She and her kids need to leave town since Cleland\u2019s kin (including Kevin Kolack and Eve Plumb) will be looking for Dwight, putting into motion a new cycle of violence and retribution.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a hint of the Coen brothers\u2019 love for regional oddity in Blue Ruin, but Saulnier\u2019s spirit is perhaps closer to that of Jeff Nichols, the writer-director of superb small-town dramas like Mud and Take Shelter. In temperament, Blue Ruin calls to mind Nichols\u2019 Shotgun Stories, which also examined how a personal feud escalates into bloodshed. It\u2019s a fine line that Saulnier walks, catering to the B-movie crowd with intelligence and feeling. Shocking bloody violence and tense suspense sequences are delivered with grindhouse precision, but because Blue Ruin initially throws us off by confounding our assumptions of who Dwight is, we\u2019re compelled to look closer at all the movie\u2019s characters, wondering what sides of themselves they\u2019re also concealing.<\/p>\n
The performances have a stripped-down rawness appropriate to the subject matter. But as exhibited by Blair, there\u2019s also a pokerfaced slyness to the proceedings. As with the Coens\u2019 thrillers, Blue Ruin isn\u2019t so much about how bad things happen but, rather, how bad things are done in hopelessly imperfect ways. Blair\u2019s Dwight is a profoundly ordinary guy, despite his surprising talent for killing, and so his attempts to stay a step ahead of the well-armed Clelands are fraught with screw-ups that border on the darkly humorous. (If nothing else, Blue Ruin will instill in viewers a healthy respect for how scary arrows are.)<\/p>\n
Although the movie is deadly serious, Blair\u2019s comically hangdog face heightens the absurdity of the back-and-forth altercations between Dwight and his pursuers. We never forget that these are regular people meting out this punishment against one another. That\u2019s what makes the film so gripping\u2014and also strangely relatable. Unexpectedly for Dwight, Blue Ruin twists from a revenge tale into a story of empathy\u2014one in which even he comes to regard the backwoods Clelands in a new light. Amidst the rising body count, Saulnier has crafted a rather sneaky treatise on seeing past preconceived notions to really understand other people. All you have to do is look.<\/p>\n
Tim Grierson is chief film critic for Paste. You can follow him on Twitter.<\/p>\n
Director: Jeremy Saulnier
\nWriter: Jeremy Saulnier
\nStarring: Macon Blair, Devin Ratray, Amy Hargreaves, Kevin Kolack, Eve Plumb, David W. Thompson, Brent Werzner, Stacy Rock, Sidn\u00e9 Anderson