Winner of the prestigious Critics’ Award at Cannes, and deservedly so, Jeremy Saulnier’s revenge thriller Blue Ruin tells a story you are most likely to be familiar with. It’s about Dwight (Macon Blair), an inscrutable vagabond with a messy beard who lives inside his worn-out car and scavenges for leftovers in garbage bags.
Every now and then, he squats in other people’s homes while the owners are away, simply to enjoy a decent bath — never to steal. He sometimes fishes, spends time at the beach, and reads books at night. He leads a pretty substandard life, and yet it’s hard to know how he feels about it, as he is one of the most opaque characters seen in recent cinema.
On a given day, he finds out that the man who murdered his parents has been released from jail. Soon, the look on his face shows a man in pain, desperate and disturbed at once. It doesn’t take long until he makes a decision: he’s going to kill his parents’ killer. Later on, we’ll see that, if necessary, he’ll kill the killer’s loved ones as well. But he can’t imagine that he’ll be swept into a never-ending circle of revenge that won’t necessarily pay off as he’d expected.
Shot on a shoe-string budget, Blue Ruin spins its tale unlike similarly-themed films.
For starters, it’s a unique slow burner that builds up suspense with admirable skill. Even though you may guess what’s to come up next, that’s no reason to make the story any less gripping. All because the focus of this drama is not so much on the killings — which, by the way, are very well executed — but in the inner turmoil and insecure behaviour of the protagonist.
This is the type of revenge movie that doesn’t have a hero, but an anti-hero. Dwight is no killer — until he becomes one — and so he doesn’t even know how to properly fire a gun of any kind. And while revenge is on his mind, it’s not in his heart always. At times, it seems that he believes he must avenge his parents, but whether he really wants to do it is hard to say. And this ambiguity is one of the first commendable merits of Blue Ruin.
Ambiguity is also to be found in the film’s discourse about violence and revenge. We are prompted to identify with Dwight and share his point of view — as a very alert camera follows him everywhere — but how we are supposed to feel about the bloodbath is actually quite uncertain. This is not a movie about a vigilante that rights a past wrong and then everything goes back to normal — on the contrary. One thing is clear though: futility is bound to take centre stage, sooner rather than later.
Also, there’s a good degree of dark irony and downright absurdity in how the events unfold, which makes Dwight’s mission all the more dramatic. But was the absurdity of it all avoidable, provided the scenario had been better prepared? Or is this the way these things go and so, no matter what, you have to accept them?
Although there isn’t that much dialogue, the unsettling sound design conveying Dwight’s inner turmoil is as eloquent as it gets — and also a bit scary. There’s something disturbing about the lack of information about Dwight, other than the bare essentials that make up a minimalist narrative where we are asked to witness without passing judgment upon these tragic events.
