Violence is difficult to treat honestly. Many directors are guilty of either shying away from gory scenes entirely or using them to make the audience uneasy. Jeremy Saulnier’s Blue Ruin, new on Netflix, takes a different tact by insisting that violence does not come out of a vacuum but from human emotions.
As the movie begins Dwight (Macon Blair) discovers that the man who killed his parents has been released from prison. Dwight is a broken man, devastated by the murders, and like a cornered animal he feels he has no option but to lash out. Inexperienced in the act of killing and delirious with adrenaline, Dwight runs scared from the bloody scene he has created, and scrambles to escape in his victim’s car.