By 
“BLUE RUIN” ****
In his second directorial effort, Jeremy Saulnier makes a dramatic allegory of blood, revenge and madness as he proves he’s a brilliant inventor of characters, a promising director to be watched. This is an impressive example of how small low-budget gems become a hit among independent enthusiasts, without any marketing just the satisfaction of the audience expressed and interacted on social media. Saulnier greets the season with a fresh take on murderous instincts, offering the audience a bloodshed that resembles the hallucinating world of violence depicted by great filmmakers such as Cronenberg, Tarantino and Lynch with a touch of suspense mastery.
Everything in this tale of revenge is unpredictable, the audience is invited to a puzzle set in an ambience of mysteries, killings, chasings, creating an amazing sense of heart-stopping suspense. In the opening scene, the narrative introduces our protagonist, a homeless guy named Dwight (vigorously played by Macon Blair) as he relaxes and cleans up in a tub inside some family’s home he’s just broke in. As he calmly walks through an amusement park surrounded by children’s shouts of joy, collecting food from trash cans, and goes back to his car parked by the beach, reading a book with a flashlight and cooking his fish on an improvised stove, we become aware there’s nothing to worry about, despite his messy appearance. His quiet behavior is confirmed when a police officer wakes him up the next morning and kindly escorts him to the station. Obviously something is wrong, and a revelation as he hears it from the officer that a criminal has been released from jail, will change that calm aspect first noticed on his personality. From this moment on, director Saulnier amazes the audience with a surprising, chilly and bloody story of an ordinary guy who isolated himself in order to acquire the strength for his revenge on the killing of his parents. He packs everything, tries to get a gun, and travels to face the man who caused his family’s destruction, while the journey is told with awesome techniques on the use of sharp editing and thrilling sounds, which proves the efficiency of Saulnier as a storyteller who is able of entertaining, shocking, and creating a suffocating but never-let-go atmosphere that every movie lover dream of. He also gets credit for the very inspired dialogs, fulfilled with sarcastic lines and irreverence. The violence is very explicit, and some scenes are kind of hard to keep on watching, especially that where Dwight tries to perform a self-surgery on his wounded leg, but that aesthetic works very well, becoming the necessary element of the film, the core and focus of our instinctive and determined avenger. (Now playing at Film Society of Lincoln Center and Angelika Film Center, Manhattan)
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