Blue Ruin (2014)

Jeremy Saulnier's Blue Ruin arrives with the grim economy of a man who has decided that exposition is a luxury he cannot afford. Dwight Evans lives out of a rusted Pontiac, learns that his parents' killer is leaving prison, and proceeds to botch a revenge so thoroughly that we spend the remaining hour watching a wounded amateur bleed across Virginia. The film is named after the car. That is the level of poetry on offer, and it works. Mr. Saulnier has spoken of grounding a revenge story in mundane, unglamorous mechanics, and the result is a thriller that treats violence as an administrative burden, complete with car trouble, hospital visits, and a crossbow bolt that must be sawed off in a field.

From a cultural standpoint, the picture is a desert. Its cast is white, its concerns are familial, and its politics are the politics of a bolt to the thigh. No character pauses to explain the moral architecture of the world. No subplot gestures toward a broader social grievance, and the film's lone thematic ambition is the revelation that everyone's parents behaved badly. There is no lecture here. There is no messaging. There is a man in a trunk, and there is a man who has forgotten his keys.

We are left to classify a film that resists classification beyond its genre, and there is something almost restful about that. It is a Kickstarter-funded neo-noir that won a prize at Cannes and then earned under a million dollars worldwide, which is its own quiet commentary on the economics of American independent cinema, though the film itself advances no such argument. On the scale of modern social consciousness, Blue Ruin registers as a zero. It has nothing to say about representation, identity, climate, capital, or the body. It has something to say about how quickly a man bleeds out, and it says it without raising its voice.