Review of Blue Ruin (2014) by Dawdlingpoet — 27 Nov 2021

This is a crime thriller film which covers themes including vengeance, vigilantism and vagrancy. This is a very violent and bloody film from relatively early on and I felt in the dark in terms of the background of the plot. The main plot is far from original but it has some good characterisation, with a surprising amount of human fragility and not in the way you may expect.

Cast wise, Macon Blair plays the main character, Dwight. He is quite an unassuming person, a fairly average joe type, not exactly a Bruce Willis or Jean Claude Van Damme type. I thought he played the role well. Other cast members include Kevin Kolack as Teddy Cleland and Eve Plumb as Kris Cleland. There wasn't anything about the cast that especially stood out to me, so I don't think I can say much about that, other than that I wasn't familiar with the cast members.

Content wise, the film is pretty violent and really quite bloody, with various scenes happening quite suddenly, thus its quite shocking. Bloody injuries include blood spurts and the like. Flesh is depicted, if briefly, so you need a relatively strong stomach - this isn't for the overly squeamish!. Strong language is used at times and more generally the film is quite dark and edgy in tone and thus could be quite frightening and disturbing, especially to younger viewers. Due to this, its been given a 15 rating.

There is an element of voyeurism at play, as we see what the main character, Dwight, is doing in often confined and dark places, as if the camera is held by someone trying to document everything, in a found footage sort of a way, so there is some relatively jerky camerawork present at times. While watching it, I felt quite edgy as it was hard to know where the next attack or move might come from and who may be responsible, so its fair to say that its got quite a tense and volatile tone to it. It had the feel, at times, of a Western shoot out type of a film. Some parts of the plot seemed pretty unlikely too - there was almost a surreal sense to it, a somewhat unsettling one at that. There were some surprisingly jumpy moments present, when things happened seemingly out of nowhere which took me by surprise. The chronology of events seemed a bit unusual too.

It was reasonably good but I'm not sure its particularly memorable, so I suppose I'm undecided really. It wasn't one of the best films I've seen this year but it wasn't totally without merit either- some people may enjoy it more than others and if you don't like bloody violent films then I'd recommend you stay away from this but otherwise I'll leave it to yourself to decide whether you should see this or not.