In short: I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore (2017)

This is the directorial debut – for Netflix - of Macon Blair whom you’ll probably know better as an actor, particularly from Jeremy Saulnier’s Blue Ruin and Green Room. I think Saulnier is a good comparison for what Blair does here as a director. At least, this one does take place in the same kind of world of sad American people existing somewhere on the edges of their society without being quite outside of it as Saulnier’s films, and to my eyes, their films belong to the same calmly yet effectively directed type of newish US indie film that might take place in comparable spaces to mumblecore but uses actual filmmaking techniques and realizes that movie dialogue that sounds exactly “like actual people talk” is boring and ineffective and goes for something that feels like actual people should talk but also wants it to actually have a point.

The film is a very dark comedy, in which nurse Ruth (Melanie Lynskey) finds herself the victim of a break-in that adds to her general feelings of disconnectedness and loneliness such a deep – and very concrete - feeling of violation that she ropes in a strange neighbour (Elijah Wood) to find the perpetrators and get her stuff back. Things quickly devolve into violence of increasing severity, though, until the climax is right out of a pretty grotesque (yet still darkly comical) revenge thriller.


This could be drab, or cynical, or simply unpleasantly making fun of unhappy people, but as Blair directs it, and Lynskey (who doesn’t settle for the likeable neurotic many actors would leave the role at but tends to add complexities when you least expect it) and the rest of the cast play it, the film is as sad as it is funny, observing a quiet kind of alienation and imagining the potential violent consequences while keeping empathy and compassion alive. Blair turns out to be particularly good at mixing standard tropes from different genres with more serious-minded observations until they turn into something more alive.

In short: Blue Ruin (2013)

Dwight (Macon Blair) has spent an indeterminate number of years homeless, camping by the side of his parents’ beat up old car many states from home. Dwight lost it when his parents were murdered (in exactly the car he’s living by) by a man called Wade Cleland (Sandy Barnett), and, as we’ll learn after a while, just fled everyone and everything that made up his former life.

When he learns that Wade has been released from prison thanks to a pledge deal, Dwight returns home to kill him, which he manages quickly, if in an awkward way that tells the rest of Wade’s family exactly who did the deed. So, as it goes with vengeance, there’ll be more violence ahead of Dwight.

Jeremy Saulnier’s Blue Ruin might sound like your run-of-the-mill revenge flick – and I’m pretty sure the writer/director/cinematographer knows the genre quite well – but is in fact everything but run-of-the-mill. It’s a quiet – there’s barely any dialogue here at all – and focussed film that seems to breathe sadness and compassion for all the broken lives acts of violence leave behind; the destruction the murder of his parents wrought in Dwight’s life and psyche is only the beginning. Violence and vengeance perpetuating themselves isn’t a new theme for this sort of thing, of course, but you’ll seldom encounter a film that is so careful in avoiding making its violence look cool on one hand, as well as in not just preaching at its audience.

Instead, Saulnier treats violence as awkward and horrible and perhaps even slightly absurd in its execution, though never in its consequences. The rest is stillness, the brittleness of everything and everyone in life and Macon Blair’s astonishing performance that shows so many things about his character with greatest precision without ever needing to tell.