This film came recommended to me by a Twitter mutual as a palate cleanser for having sat through Hillbilly Elegy. Have to admit, this film’s been on my radar for a little while now because of just how packed its cast is (up to and including my celebrity crush Tom Holland), and while just about anything would’ve been palatable compared to whatever the hell Ron Howard was thinking, I guess this is the push I need to finally check this flick out.
This has got to be one of the bleakest films I’ve seen all year, and that’s purely by design. Adapted from Donald Ray Pollock’s novel of the same name (with him serving as narrator throughout), it’s a thriller set in Appalachia where basically every single person is awful in their own way. A dirty cop, a preaching paedophile, a serial killer couple who are only a blood relation away from being the leads in Island Of Death, a dog-killing soldier; it’s a cavalcade of cunts, basically. And the film has no pretence about how fucked-up these people are.
As brutal as this can get (it opens with a bloody crucifixion and doesn’t exactly grow taste from then on), I have respect for this production because it isn’t just parading evil for its own sake. Instead, through historical and cultural context, it sheds some light on why this collective mood of dickery has so ensnared these people. On the historical side of things, the film takes place in the interim between World War II and Vietnam, with Bill Skarsgård’s Willard carrying mental scars from what he saw in the former, and his son Arvin, played by Holland, closing things out with the possibility of involvement in the latter.
Wartime, even for those who aren’t on the front line, has a way of affecting how a society views its own options. Its own approaches to the everyday. Maintaining the spirit of the people is just as important as those of the troops, and to do so, it often involves instilling a similar lust for blood. A want to see the enemy dead, lest they get to us first, and doing whatever else is deemed necessary to get us through the horror of it all. And as we watch these characters, who protect themselves (and only occasionally their own) with bullets and bloodspray, it’s clear that such a mentality has taken hold.
As for the cultural side of things… okay, that’s just a euphemism for the religious themes that form the common thread between all these disparate storylines. Watching Willard witness that crucifixion on the battlefield, then erect his own cross in his backyard, you’d think the war didn’t even get to him if his faith survived such an encounter. Then again, worshipping the innocent dead is what every Christian does. To paraphrase KRS-One, if Jesus were executed by the state today, they’d be kneeling before an electric chair.
Their faith, or at least their self-held pretence of faith, goes into many of the character motivations here. Some of which are downright hysterical, like a preacher who kills his wife just so he can pray to God to bring her back from the dead, but it’s mostly anger-inducing, like how conveniently the paedophile brushes off any responsibility for the shit he’s done, or the photography enthusiast who only feels a connection to God when he takes human life, or the aforementioned dog slaughter as a sacrifice so that the divine will spare someone else. They baptise in the blood of the lamb, not as forgiveness for their sins, but as the result of them.
While the film at large does drag a fair bit (yet another film that didn’t really need to be over two hours in length), and the sheer amount of fridging going on can get a bit ridiculous, for something that sets out to be disturbing with a point behind it, it still works overall. The acting across the board is solid, with a nice assortment of American, British, and Australian talent at hand (all of whom handle the local accents surprisingly well), and while it’s not the easiest thing to sit through, that’s because it’s not supposed to be. It’s a grim, but honestly grim, depiction of post-war Americana, where no punches are pulled at showing sin masquerading as piety and the society that cultivates it. The Devil works in mysterious ways.
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