Have a Daily Scream for your daily-streaming recommendation for spooky season! (Explore last year’s Daily Scream films.)
It’s perhaps not a traditional horror movie, but Jeremy Saulnier’s 2014 Southern gothic revenge thriller Blue Ruin is a movie about a thing that pulpy scary movies traffic in often with nary a second thought: what it means to kill to fellow human being.
Macon Blair — in a performance of terrified rage and abject, pitiable desperation — is out for a revenge that we don’t understand at first. But Saulnier and Blair portray it with a genuine sense of humanity, and a genuine sense of the horror of killing another person. There is total fear and utter grief here, visceral pain and bloody mess. This is as emotionally raw as violent movies ever get.
Blue Ruin is gruesome without being gratuitous, and dizzying in the vulnerability of our flesh. How little physical effort, we seem to be asked to ponder, it takes to kill someone: just thrust the knife, or pull the trigger. And how much mental effort. So much.
(Saulnier has a new film on Netflix, Rebel Ridge, which I cannot wait to catch up with.)
US: stream on Prime and Tubi; rent/buy on Prime
UK: not streaming anywhere, alas, but on DVD and blu-ray
See Blue Ruin at Letterboxd for more viewing options, including in all other global regions.
