Deborah Ross

Blue Ruin is unwatchable, bloody – but, from what I saw, rather good

Plus: a quiet portrait of the 90-year-old photographer Jane Brown that benefits from not showing anyone gouging out an arrowhead from their own thigh

Macon Blair in Blue Ruin [Getty Images/Shutterstock/iStock/Alamy] 
issue 03 May 2014

Blue Ruin is a low-budget yet highly accomplished revenge thriller although whether you have the stomach for it is another matter. I do not have a strong stomach, as we know, and as I braced myself for the next startlingly bloody burst of violence, having yet to recover from the last startlingly bloody burst of bloody violence, I was often just longing for it all to be over. I like excellent film-making as much as the next person but, ideally, I would also like to be able to watch it.

Stuff you don’t need to know but might like to: this has been a huge festival hit, winning several prizes, and much acclaim for its writer-director Jeremy Saulnier, who had previously only made corporate videos and one small feature (Murder Party). Also: it was shot in 30 days, and funded by a raid on his wife’s retirement fund, his credit card, and a last-minute Kickstarter campaign. And: it is so low-budget he used his parents’ house as one of the locations. Finally: Saulnier is obviously special, although why he can’t say it with flowers, or softly falling snow, I don’t know.

The ten-minute opening is virtually wordless and extremely special, an absolute masterclass in showing and not telling; in creating feeling while seemingly doing nothing. We simply watch a homeless man, with straggly hair and bushy beard, living somewhere along the Delaware shore, search through bins for food, steal into houses to have a wash, avoid people and sleep in his rusted, beat-up, old blue Pontiac; the ‘Blue Ruin’ of the title, I’m guessing. This is Dwight, as played with fantastic delicacy by Macon Blair, who infuses the character with such soulful longing, and such a sense of loss, we immediately find we are on his side, even though his side, it will turn out, is possibly no better than anyone else’s.

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So he’s silently going about his business when he’s approached by a policewoman and asked to accompany her to the station, at which point the film puts its foot on the accelerator.

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