It’s got one of the all-time great first acts
Blue Ruin begins with a slow pan through an average suburban home that carries us to Dwight (Macon Blair), a bearded man currently taking a bath. There’s a noise; someone’s inside the house. Dwight jumps out the window – guess it wasn’t his place after all - and from there we follow him through a near-subsistence lifestyle that revolves around living in his crumbling car (the “Blue Ruin” of the title). Through this wordless sequence, the details of his life – on the fringes of society, but he’s surviving – come into place, but it’s not until a police officer lets him know that the man who killed his parents is out of jail that we start to understand why he lives like this. Now instead of scavenging from dumpsters and watching on as others enjoy an amusement park, he’s trying to get ahold of a weapon: what comes next may solve one of his problems, but it’s going to cause a whole lot more.
Director Jeremy Saulnier is a star on the rise
Blue Ruin is only writer/director Jeremy Saulnier’s second film (the first was the low budget horror comedy Murder Party). But his experience as a cinematographer – he worked with indie director Matthew Porterfield on all three of his films, amongst others – really shines through in his often beautiful, always striking take on a string of dingy, decaying Virginian locations. While the first act is a classic of streamlined storytelling, he’s no slouch when it comes to ramping up the tension either, with every action scene feeling fresh and raw in a way that’s increasingly rare. All this marked him out as a director to watch; his follow-up film, the absurdly tense 2016 punk rock thriller Green Room, more than justified the attention.
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Macon Blair is amazing in the lead
In another actor’s hands, Dwight would be a figure of fun. A lot of his character is built around comedic bits; fleeing from a house wearing nothing but a towel, disabling a car then realising he needs to use it as a getaway vehicle, undergoing a mid-movie transformation that turns him into a generically forgettable white collar stiff. Even when things turn violent, Dwight is hardly the ruthlessly efficient killing machine of most revenge thrillers. But while Blair never stifles the comedy in Dwight’s actions, he never lets us forget that Dwight is a broken man, an empty shell going through the motions because he’s too scared to think of any other way to live. His ruin underpins this film, and Blair is startlingly good at keeping it simmering away.
It’s full of (literal) knife-edge suspense
A lot of vigilante movies (and action movies in general) stylise their violence so heavily it means next to nothing. Not Blue Ruin; every time Dwight gets in a fight Saulnier finds a way to make sure we know exactly what’s at stake. This is a film where everything hurts, often in surprising ways; the traditional “I’ve been shot, time to dig the bullet out, splash some booze on the wound and move on” scene is given an eye-opening twist when Dwight gets a crossbow bolt in his leg and takes care of it in a way that’s not medically recommended.
It strips away the glamour from the vigilante movie
There’s often a perverse glamour to vigilante movies. Having suffered a grievous wrong, our hero stands up and says they’re not going to let this wrong stand; who doesn’t feel some kind of connection to that? The brutal, ruthless way they extract their revenge as they remorselessly exterminate those who ruined their life only adds to their appeal. But while Blue Ruin shares the bare bones of that story, Dwight never takes pleasure or strength in his actions; at one stage he’s re-united with his sister (who has moved on from their parents deaths), and when she calls him “weak” he doesn’t argue. The path he’s chosen isn’t one of righteous fury and blood-splattered glory. He’s a scared man killing people because he can’t see any other way to go on, and when he wants to stop he’s gone too far to turn around.
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Watch 'Blue Ruin' now at SBS On Demand
