Three Films Make A Post: Some Rides Should Never Be Shared

The Ranger (2018): I’ve read quite a few good things about Jenn Wexler’s throwback slasher, and it’s certainly a better film than many another of this particular genre by virtue of not being crap. However, while it does do a couple of half-clever things, it never quite comes together for me. The slashing and the violence isn’t impactful enough for my tastes, the psychological underpinnings not quite sharp enough, and the titular Ranger never feels like anything but a movie psycho who talks too much. It’s still perfectly serviceable but I have to admit I expected something more/deeper from it than it delivered.

Ride (2018): This, one the other hand, directed by Jeremy Unger, promises to deliver some sort of psychological cat-and-mouse game between a not-Uber driver (Jessie T. Usher), a passenger (Bella Thorne) and another passenger who turns out to be a manipulative sociopath (Will Brill), but keeps the psychological tension too loose for much too long, spending the first half of what is a pretty short running time on nearly desperate attempts to be An LA Movie™. So we get the name dropping, the place dropping, and way too much insipid small talk I can only hope isn’t actually what’s going on in not-taxis in LA. This, again, isn’t a terrible film, but it is trying so hard to be meta-clever one, it misses out on simply being a good one first.

Murder Party (2007): Whereas this film about a lonely guy who stumbles upon what he thinks is an exclusive Halloween party but quickly finds himself victimized by a bunch of would-be artists planning to kill him FOR ART, is indeed meta and clever, actually meta and clever. It’s an often outrageously funny bit of the darkest comedy that climaxes in more blood and gore than I would have expected coming in. On the way, it satirizes a certain kind of poseur artist, people who make fun of poseur artists, itself, and stories about people getting sacrificed for art.


At the same time, Saulnier also manages to portray these rather broad characters and their relations in a curiously kind and believable way, somehow mocking them without feeling cruel. And nobody’s talking about his guest spot on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. either.

In short: Green Room (2015)

A small series of unfortunate events leads the members of a punk rock group (Anton Yelchin, Joe Cole, Alia Shawkat, Callum Turner and David W. Thompson) onto the stage of a rural Nazi skinhead bar. As if that weren’t bad enough, after the gig, they stumble onto the aftermath of a murder in the backroom. The Nazis, led by club owner Darcy (Patrick Stewart), operate on a clear no witnesses policy, so the band and not-really-a-member-of-the-Nazi-club-anymore Amber (Imogen Poots) soon barricade themselves in a room while a horde of murderous assholes (and their dogs) try to kill them.

Where Jeremy Saulnier’s last film, Blue Ruin, applied lessons learned from US arthouse indie cinema to the vengeance flick, Green Room does something similar to the classic siege movie, though this one is a bit more invested in fulfilling certain genre expectations than the earlier film. That’s not a bad thing, mind you, for Saulnier fulfils these expectations with calm and thought, telling the horrible misadventures of people way in over their heads through no fault of their own with an economy and efficiency one can’t help but imagine the patron saints (say Hawks and Carpenter) of the kind of genre movies this is modelled on would look upon approvingly.

There’s still quite a bit of US indie cinema tradition on display here, particularly in the acting approach, especially the line delivery. Now, I’ve seen a few reviews complaining about the dialogue being difficult to understand, but to my ears, that’s really just people either needing to get their ears checked or not able to cope with a somewhat more naturalistic acting style. The acting is actually pretty great, every Brit on screen (and there are quite a few of them) putting on their best US accents, and projecting appropriate levels of hysteria and fear while doing believably stupid shit, their characters not being action heroes and all. Patrick Stewart does some fine work for once playing a bad guy (and an American), avoiding scenery chewing for a more banal kind of evil, which seems the appropriate way to portray a neo Nazi.

Once Green Room gets going, events evolve quickly into some truly horrible violence, where a badly broken hand looks like a bloody mess, and death by dog seems as frightening and plain horrifying as it would be in reality. Particularly the first few deaths hit pretty hard, not because Saulnier is pulling out all the stops when it comes to gore – he’s certainly not afraid of showing the bloody consequences of violence but he’s not lingering on these things either – but because their staging feels believable, real, and final in a way not many directors even try to achieve. Despite not going in the direction of torture porn and despite following more of a thriller plot structure, Green Room does feel like a horror film for most of its running time, thanks to a lingering sense of dread hanging over much of it.

At the same time, the film is also a really tight, claustrophobic and inventive siege movie; just one that’s perfectly ready to hit characters and audience with an expertly timed low blow from time to time.

In short: Blue Ruin (2013)

Dwight (Macon Blair) has spent an indeterminate number of years homeless, camping by the side of his parents’ beat up old car many states from home. Dwight lost it when his parents were murdered (in exactly the car he’s living by) by a man called Wade Cleland (Sandy Barnett), and, as we’ll learn after a while, just fled everyone and everything that made up his former life.

When he learns that Wade has been released from prison thanks to a pledge deal, Dwight returns home to kill him, which he manages quickly, if in an awkward way that tells the rest of Wade’s family exactly who did the deed. So, as it goes with vengeance, there’ll be more violence ahead of Dwight.

Jeremy Saulnier’s Blue Ruin might sound like your run-of-the-mill revenge flick – and I’m pretty sure the writer/director/cinematographer knows the genre quite well – but is in fact everything but run-of-the-mill. It’s a quiet – there’s barely any dialogue here at all – and focussed film that seems to breathe sadness and compassion for all the broken lives acts of violence leave behind; the destruction the murder of his parents wrought in Dwight’s life and psyche is only the beginning. Violence and vengeance perpetuating themselves isn’t a new theme for this sort of thing, of course, but you’ll seldom encounter a film that is so careful in avoiding making its violence look cool on one hand, as well as in not just preaching at its audience.

Instead, Saulnier treats violence as awkward and horrible and perhaps even slightly absurd in its execution, though never in its consequences. The rest is stillness, the brittleness of everything and everyone in life and Macon Blair’s astonishing performance that shows so many things about his character with greatest precision without ever needing to tell.