Saulnier: Blue Ruin (2014)

From the first couple of scenes, you could be forgiven for mistaking Blue Ruin for anything other than a revenge thriller. Opening in the flat, affectless style that’s become such a hallmark of indie cinema over the last decade, it follows an unkempt drifter, Dwight Evans (Macon Blair), as he scavenges for survival across an anonymous stretch of Californian coastline. There’s no dialogue, very little sound and almost no sense of linear progression – just a series of static, photographic shots that are so unassuming that they don’t even really seem to qualify as mise-en-scenes. In fact, so unprepossessing and sombient are these first few sequences that they barely even register when Dwight abruptly travels to Virginia, upon learning that the man responsible for murdering his parents has just been released from prison. Even if you do fully process or notice the transition, it’s only a couple of minutes before Dwight takes his revenge, leaving us stranded, twenty minutes in, in a post-revenge world that’s utterly devoid of catharsis, totally unable to restore Dwight to his lost home. More like revenge committed by rote than with any real expectation of release, Dwight’s actions – if you can even call them that – render the world even deader than before, cloaking everything in a dazed murk that overwhelms any capacity for autonomy beyond the most basic flight-or-flight response. Watching it is like being steeped in the deepest, most debilitating depression, which is not exactly to say that it’s devoid of action, since Dwight’s actions produce a immediate ripple effect, but that every action sinks back into Saulnier’s sombience the moment that it’s occurred, even or especially the ultra-violent sequences that periodically puncture the narrative. As a result, the more the film escalates Dwight’s revenge into a series of subsidiary retributions and home invasions, the more it reiterates his fundamental and inescapable apathy, as if to denude indie flatness to the point where it becomes as visceral and unbearable as the most graphic violence. Taking two steps back for every step forward, Saulnier only accelerates to decelerate, until there’s virtually nothing left in the film at all, let alone any impetus to continue with the spiralling Southern Gothic bloodbath, which seems to proceed more or less autonomously. Like watching a stream-of-consciousness revenge flick in which there’s no unifying consciousness, every shot feels homeless and every act feels aimless, creating some surprisingly freeform, satirical moments, most memorably the appearance of Devin Ratray - Home Alone's Buzz McAllister - to give Dwight some much-needed tips on home invasion. However, the satire disappears in Saulnier's sensory deprivation chamber as quickly as the violence, leaving us with a vision of America so saturated with injustice that justice itself can no longer hope to compensate, let alone the wild justice so precious to the American vigilante cinema being channelled and corroded here.