4 out of 5

Directed by: Jeremy Saunier

The comparison to Tarantino and the Coens are deserved: Jeremy Saunier’s Blue Ruin embraces the former’s love of telling a story, visually, with the latter’s appreciation of low-key noir.  But what makes Blue Ruin special – notable – is that its not your usual carbon copy of these stalwarts, where one would say that it’s ‘Tarantino-esque,’ for example.  The visual language is absolutely Saunier’s own, and takes care with the way it bends viewers into believing one thing or another simply through images; through things left unsaid.  And when it does speak, the dialogue is natural: informative without being over-expository; saying it all without directly having to say it, but also without shoving an absolute minimalist approach down our throats.

‘Ruin’ is pretty much a revenge tale.  If there is a failing to Saunier’s film, it’s the simplicity of that statement: there aren’t really many bells and whistles to the story.  Now their don’t have to be, that’s absolutely true, but that it boils down to something so small allows us to somewhat settle on Ruin’s main characters as being rather good or evil, culminating in the final moments when the bad guys are almost cartoonishly so.  Saunier seems aware of this, attempting to underline the humanity of all involved with those wonderfully subdued exploratory clips of family photos or just the way the camera lingers through a home, but that’s the component that the Coen’s Blood Simple and Fargo sell to us so absolutely – the tragedy of these events – which doesn’t quite hit home in Blue Ruin.

But that’s when we wrap around to just being told an effective story with precision.  We start with Dwight (Macon Blair), haggard and pretty much homeless, stealing baths from vacant houses and food from the trash when he gets the news that the man who done him wrong is being released from prison.  And this kicks Dwight into gear: his mission of revenge.  The methods by which Dwight approaches this make up the bulk of the movie and offer us plenty of What Would You Do? fuel, as Dwight, of regular intelligence, sets about trying to procure a gun – and dealing with everything that results from the film’s escalating series of events – reacting to matters in a scrambling way that we can all believe, and see ourselves doing, going against the grain of the calculated revenge tales we’ve seen from this same era of film, a la Taken.  Blair’s humble performance as Dwight makes it all the more real, and nerve-wracking, when he knows just enough to stumble through but not enough to really plan things out beyond the next few steps.

When the film concluded, I went back and considered how much Jeremy had covered with very few visual or audible “cues” for the audience.  This commodity had me on the edge of my seat throughout, invested in my expectations.  If that same precision can be applied with a slightly more layered script, we’ll certainly have a film that’s a contender for the list of genre greats.  But given what the director accomplished here, his second film, a low budget, small-crew affair, even if he can’t expand upon it, it’s always a joy to see a new, unique voice emerge in the world of film, influenced by – but not aping – those that have come before.