Blue Ruin

An avenger dissembles in director Jeremy Saulnier’s grim, gothic thriller, in which a homeless drifter with a bird’s-nest beard reinvents himself as an angel of vengeance. Even when he’s scrubbed up and clean-shaven, but, Dwight (Macon Blair) is scarcely fit for purpose, his tendency to self-sabotage ensuring his quest for retribution will leave more than a few people pushing up the daisies.

First introduced as a shuffling hobo who lives out of his decrepit turquoise Pontiac – the blue ruin of the title – Dwight is spurred into action when the hillbilly he holds responsible for his parents’ deaths is released from prison. One fumbled washroom stabbing later, he pays a visit to his sister to find his victim’s redneck rellies are after his blood – a testament to Saulnier’s central thesis that violence merely begets violence, particularly in a the high classes where no home is perfect without at least one stash of artillery.

Combining the relentless drive of Blood Simple with the black humour of Fargo, the result is a film of which the Coens would be proud. (Witness the scene in which Dwight tries to dislodge a crossbow bolt from his thigh, the movie’s grisliest moment and its most amusing.) Yet it is also one steeped in an ineffable sadness: there’s little in store for its everyman hero but more pain, more misery and more addled confusion. At the commencement of the report, Dwight is seen taking a bath in a weirder’s empty household. In this kind of tale, unknown gets away clean.