Blue Ruin (2013)

Every so often, when the stars align, along comes a small art-house flick that manages to capture your attention like nothing before. And Blue Ruin, filmmaker Jeremy Saulnier's Cannes Film Festival entry, certainly captured my attention like nothing before. It's certainly odd – no big names behind it, no overcomplicated tat, just clean and effective filmmaking. I liked that, and I loved Blue Ruin. True to its namesake, it is a very blue movie; his car, the car seats, the faint illumination of an LED lamp, and the sunny skies, all very blue. Similarly blue is the story itself – soaked in melancholy, it is very tragic indeed.

Blue Ruin is about a vagrant called Dwight. He has a scraggly beard, and lives out of his car. He sorts through trash for leftovers, and squats in homes while the owners are on holiday. His existence is rather sad, but rather uplifting all the same – by day he fishes and sits on the beach, and by night he reads books by the light of a little LED lamp. You are rarely disgusted by his life — you may cringe as he tears into garbage bags in search of food, bon appétit — but otherwise he is pretty OK in my books. Dwight lives a sad existence, but seems fairly content all the same.

But like a string of a sweater, his tragic life rapidly unravels. The murderer of his parents, revealed by a tiny newspaper article, is out of jail. Dwight, understandably, is very upset. Some may sit and wallow in the injustice of the release, but he does anything but, as he jump-starts his tatty blue car and heads to his hometown. There, he exacts his revenge, and his muddled past is slowly unravelled.

I adore films that have the guts to show, instead of just telling the audience everything upon entry. Blue Ruin had the ability to squander everything, and squish the back story into some lazy exposition or some heavyhanded narration. It, however, doesn't. We can latch onto the curtain, and tug as hard as we can to reveal the stage behind, but that stage is shrouded in the fog of mystery. Thank goodness it is, I say. If it weren't, this film wouldn't have much substance. But, hiding behind the convenient layers of the story, it reveals the necessities and lets your mind wander. Nothing more, nothing less.

If I didn't know any better, I would instantly associate Blue Ruin with the brutality of Nicolas Winding Refn, or the dark wit of the Coen brothers. It's a fairly typical revenge movie – Dwight is angry about an injustice, and proceeds to shoot almost everything. By that description, you'd likely associate it with a Tarantino flick – but it isn't one. The most interesting element of Saulnier's revenge flick is its humanity. This isn't to say Tarantino is without humanity, just Blue Ruin has oodles and oodles of it. Dwight seems to stumble through everything, smothering fingerprints over every surface, and coating everything in blood. Hell, at one point he tries to imitate the Terminator as he attempts to remove an arrow from his leg – scalpel at the ready, and blood oozing from his wound, he ends up stumbling into an operating room, and having it removed there instead. He doesn't really know what he is doing, but he gets there in the end nonetheless.

And he proceeds to stumble throughout the rest of the story. He isn't good with a gun, but he proves himself an adequate assassin. Similarly, he falls asleep whilst awaiting his victims in their home, but he wakes up just in the nick of time. He is told to just shoot, and not waste ti

Fmovies: When asked about the title of the movie, just after the screening at the AFI Silver on Saturday, the writer/director/cinematographer answered that the title is a synonym for debacle, and sure enough, it was there when I looked it up.

That about sums up what happens when a hapless grieving amateur seeks vengeance, a debacle.

The writer director and the star of the film have been at this movie making thing since they were both 8 years old. It is just great to see they broke through. You should know that the movie is 8 out of 10 and climbing on the indie list on Itunes. While you can see this on VOD, it is best seen on the big screen, and it is well worth the trip.

A loner and outsider gets alarmed when informed of someone's release from prison and sets out to find him. Following this, a series of killings take place but since the main character is not a professional hit man he seems to be getting into deeper and deeper trouble.

This is for the most part a moral tale. One is convicted for a committed crime and the family of the victim feels it appropriate to murder him upon his release based on a fear for reprisals. When you think you have a justifiable cause to kill another human being, a Pandora's box opens and you better be prepared for the consequences.

Edgy and intense it has confirmed my affection for independent cinema and despite some flaws in its storyline it has an air of originality attached to it.

Blue Ruin fmovies. One of the strongest achievements in recent years in independent cinema is "Blue Ruin". It's brilliantly written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier who just a few years ago was making his own amateur monster movies with his friends, some of whom were involved in this inspired revenge thriller that is the antithesis of the usual commercial revenge thriller.

Shot on a less-than-shoestring budget, it stars Macon Blair (best friend of Saulnier since childhood) as Dwight, an apparent homeless drifter housing a grudge against a convict about to be released from prison whom he feels had murdered his parents. Dwight is obviously unaccustomed to violence (he's never fired a gun) and, as in the best of the Noir classics, makes one bad decision that plunges him way over his head into a harrowing murder plot that'll keep viewers on the edge of their seats.

What makes this film so unique is how its suspense comes from slow, quiet inexorable tension punctuated with a few acts of violence that seem authentic, bearing none of the sensationalism or tired clichés one gets in garbage like "Taken" and its tiresome ilk. The triumph of "Blue Ruin" is even greater when one realizes that its director used his own family house and his family car making it, and managed such a height of verisimilitude by using cinema in its purest form. Here an 'amateur' outdoes the Hollywood pros in making a superb virtually perfect thriller that won't easily be forgotten.

"Revenge, at first though sweet, bitter ere long back on itself recoils." – John Milton, Paradise Lost

Killing has become so routine in movies today that no one blinks an eye when half a dozen people are slaughtered in the space of thirty seconds. Not that many people die in so short a time in Jeremy Saulnier's Blue Ruin, however, but the violence is, as the director himself describes it, "brutal, shocking and disturbing." The main character, Dwight (Macon Blair) is an inept bumbler but one who is driven to exact revenge for his parents murder, a decision that leads to many and varied dead ends, both literal and figurative. Though Dwight is not an especially sympathetic protagonist and is more often than not, an object of laughter, his presence throughout the film is captivating with Blair's performance superbly capturing his emotionless banality.

Set in rural Virginia, we know little of Dwight's background and there are no extraneous sub-plots, one-liners, fatherly mentors, or love affairs to distract us from finding out. He is not mentally ill, bullied in school, or a man seething with anger, but a lonely and isolated individual doing what is expected of him in a society where violence is equated with manhood. When we first meet Dwight, he is a long-haired, disheveled, and generally unkempt-looking individual who you would probably want to avoid if he was walking behind you late at night. Down on his luck, he sleeps in a rusty old blue Pontiac that looks about as scruffy as he does, eats food out of garbage dumps, and sneaks into people's homes to take a shower.

We only find the cause of his present state when a supportive policewoman tells him that Carl Cleland (Brent Werzner), the man who was in prison for killing his parents has just been released after serving many years. Revenge is swift and bloody when Dwight follows the newly-freed man into the men's room at a bar and stabs him to death with a knife, an attack that leaves no doubt that stabbing someone in the throat produces lots of blood. Unthinkingly leaving his registered car at the scene of the crime, Dwight, now clean shaven and looking like any suburban businessman, knows that he has opened up a war between families and that his sister Sam (Amy Hargreaves) will be targeted by the rest of the Cleland clan, stereotypically good ol' boys.

The Cleland's decide not to call the police but choose to keep the feud "in house," forcing Dwight to send Sam and her two small children out of town, while he waits for the boys to arrive and they don't let him down. Though he somehow manages to escape after overpowering brother Teddy (Kevin Kolack) and locking him in the trunk of his car, he has an arrow in his leg that he tries to remove it himself with much moaning and groaning. Finally relenting, he lets the doctors finish the job at the nearest hospital (one wonders how many patients the doctors treat with arrows in their legs because they curiously don't ask any questions).

Dwight knows that he needs weapons, however, if he is to stay alive and contacts Ben (Devin Ratray, Buzz in Home Alone), a friend from high school and the rest of the film unfolds in an unpredictable, but quietly riveting manner. Winner of the FIPRESCI award at Cannes last year, Blue Ruin is an intense character study that, in essence, is a cautionary tale. While it doesn't glamorize violence, it has enough of it to make us take notice. Though the Bible (Exodus 21:24) tells us that we should take

A low-budget independent film that is nevertheless handsomely and confidently shot, Blue Ruin is a consistently unpredictable, twisty, and excellent thriller. At no point will you be quite sure where the film will take you, or what direction it will go next, up until maybe around the final scene.

Indeed, the film is so unpredictable, it would be a sin to tell you much about it.

But-- "Dwight is a vagrant, scavenging for food in dumpsters and sleeping by the beach in a broken-down car. His aimless existence is interrupted, however, when he receives notice that a man from his past is being released from prison." That's an abridged version of the PFF summary, and about all you need to know. I would recommend reading nothing else about the story of this film. Take the risk and dive in blind.

I was shocked how good Saulnier, a director I've never heard of until now, was good at generating suspense.

It was accepted into the Director's Fortnight at Cannes.