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.

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