Blue Ruin
Director: Jeremy Saulnier
Starring: Macon Blair, Devin Ratray, Amy Hargreaves
90 mins; Class 15;
Eden Cinema Release

Macon Blair is an actor with rather ordinary, Everyman looks. He is not famous, and a glimpse at his filmography reveals a body of work which is largely unknown.

I would wager that that is set to change, for his performance in Blue Ruin is one of such depth and meaning it has deservedly made critics and audiences stand up and take notice.

Blair stars as Dwight, a man whom we first meet taking a bath, although he is also desperately in need of a haircut and a shave.

He is disturbed from his bath by a sound and as he frantically scrambles out of the bath and flees out of a window, it is clear he is not meant to be there.

Dwight is a homeless man who lives in the wreck of his family’s blue car, walking across beaches in search of trinkets and scavenging dustbins for food.

His simple life is brought crashing down when he learns that the man responsible for his parents’ death has been released from prison.

Heading back to his family home to reconnect with his estranged sister, he plans to carry out his revenge.

Dwight is not a killer, yet his actions spark off a cycle of violence which he cannot stop.

Blue Ruin’s success lies in two factors. On the one hand is Blair’s quite extraordinary performance as Dwight, a man whom fate has dealt a crappy card.

It shows the plight of the ordinary man thrown into a situation he cannot extricate himself from; this plight has never been so vividly portrayed.

Blair carries the film on his fragile shoulders, appearing in virtually every scene and, for the first 20 minutes or so, he barely says a word, telling us his story with his darting eyes and nervous mannerisms.

He hits every note perfectly, whether in his concern for his estranged sister, the palpable hatred for his target, or the genuine fear that he emits with his every move as he badly handles any weapon he obtains.

It’s a stripped-down and very real performance that has the viewer following his every move with anxiety.

A painfully nerve-racking thriller

The film’s second trump card is director/writer Jeremy Saulnier’s less-is-more approach. It is a straightforward, stark, no-frills story, which Saulnier’s script tells with no extraneous sub-plots or characters padding the narrative.

It is simply a tale of a single man seeking revenge on those who wronged him, and facing the consequences of his actions.

Granted, it is a story we have seen numerous times before, but Saulnier is to be applauded for not trying to add anything to that. Yes, he has crafted a painfully nerve-racking thriller; yet he truly gets deep into the issue, underscoring the hopelessness of the mind-numbing cycle of violence that typefies the revenge genre as Dwight gets himself deeper and deeper into trouble and the body count threatens to get higher.

Apart from its high production and storytelling values, Blue Ruin – which won the prestigious FIPRESCI prize awarded by international film critics and journalists at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, and numerous other awards – gained notoriety for the fact that it is a film that was funded by a crowd-funding campaign, through which the film-makers raised the money for the project from numerous individuals via the internet.

According to Forbes.com, the overall crowd-funding economy has reached over $5 billion, and Blue Ruin is considered one of the funding model’s success stories, a welcome inspiration for many aspiring film-makers.