Blue Ruin: A Stripped-Down, Effective Revenge Drama

Dwight Evans wants mortal revenge on a man freshly released from jail. I don't blame him. If my parents were murdered, I would want payback just as badly as he does. Believe it or not, I've just told you everything you need to know about this movie. In the wrong hands, I can easily see Blue Ruin flying off to Lord knows where to become yet another casualty of the fact that revenge thrillers often attract the lowest common denominator of filmmaker. However, through the capable eyes of director Jeremy Saulnier (Rebel Ridge), it ended up being an efficient and even thoughtful drama that refuses to scratch the "revenge itch" without ignoring the complexity of the idea altogether. Nonetheless, its narrative simplicity is jarring, rivaled only by its occasionally visceral setpieces. In a cinematic landscape dominated by light shows competing for attention, I think it's ironic that you can get attention simply by going back to the bare basics.

Blue Ruin doesn't waste a second of its runtime or even a hint of its breath. Without so much as a single line of dialogue from our main character, Dwight, I learned that he was a drifter and a loner, the type of man to sneak into someone else's house to take a bath. Blue Ruin is minutely intelligent and remarkably efficient, the kind of movie that reveals twice the character in half the time with a quarter of the tools. It's stripped down to a lean runtime of an hour and a half, and typically, I'd have substantial complaints about a pace as ruthlessly breakneck as this one. But Blue Ruin doesn't miss a beat. I was expecting a half hour of screen time to have passed by the time I first checked in on the runtime, but this movie had accomplished everything it had in half the time I expected it to, using nothing but old-fashioned, simple, intelligent filmmaking, no frills attached. If I had to level a complaint against it, Blue Ruin can fall into oversimplification, and it hits bumps in the road when its story demands something more complicated and substantial from it. Still, this simplicity is a refreshing departure from the sugary, disposable blockbusters you can see at your local theater any day of the week.

I have mixed feelings about the uncomplicated nature of Blue Ruin, but I'm down bad for its bluntness. This movie is not fancy, and it contains one truly grimace-worthy self-surgery scene that's primally distressing and realistic in a way no slasher film could ever be. This is a movie that's free of any major gimmicks, a straightforward story where what you see is what you get, and where what you see is always as pragmatic as I didn't know I needed this movie to be. Blue Ruin also contains almost no musical score of any kind, content to lean on its characters to do nearly all the driving. The fascinating thing is that this minimalism works more than it doesn't, trickling down to its almost-cloudy cinematography. The frame of this movie is dirty by almost any standard, adding a lot of character to what would have otherwise been an easily recognizable small-town America setting. This consistent vision makes sense in many ways, as Saulnier pulls double duty as director and cinematographer. For as much as some may ask for more than Blue Ruin is willing to give, no one will ever accuse it of being anything less than fervent.

Blue Ruin is a simple revenge flick that is just unsatisfying enough in all the right ways. I've heard the revenge is futile PSA enough times to get a little bit queasy whenever I hear it repeated, but rarely has such a sentiment ever felt so honest, so tangible. For every gimmick-laden action movie out there, sometimes it's more satisfying to go back to the basics, which Blue Ruin does, and then some. It's a brisk, yet somehow slow and methodical drama that is loyal to the basics of its story and of storytelling itself to a fault. Rarely have I seen a movie that has, for better or for worse, been so genuine. Be warned, this movie will not tie everything up for you with a nice, tidy bow. It does something that's arguably more valuable instead. It allows itself to be messy. It allows itself to remain displeasing. I think that's the point. The appeal is missing from this story in ways that make me wonder how we as the human race ever bought into the idea of gratifying revenge in the first place, me included.

Blue Ruin - 9/10

Revelation 16:4-11