Bullitt County (2018)

Warning: contains vague spoilers about the ending and the film’s structure!

It’s the late 70s. Four friends – Gordie (Mike C. Nelson), Keaton (director/writer David McCracken), Robin (Jenni Melear) and Wayne (Napoleon Ryan) – come together for a days-long outing they call a bachelor “party” for Gordie after quite some time of drifting apart. These attempts of rekindling old fires always work well, right? One can’t help but think that Keaton’s idea of taking the tiny gang on their old famous Kentucky distillery trip for it just might be a bit misguided, given that Gordie’s a recovering alcoholic. Once we get to know the characters a little more, the whole affair seems even more doomed, for the whole distillery trip’s just bound to remind everyone exactly of the catastrophic event that started them off on their way to drifting apart.

But that’s not all that’s wrong here: Gordie clearly carries a deep, simmering resentment towards himself and his friends around that tends to express itself through violence against the world, as well as a deep – and clearly not reciprocated – crush on Robin; Keaton’s still not a proper grown-up; and Robin’s still trying to be friends with people she obviously has outgrown quite some time ago. So it seems like an even worse idea than the distillery tour when Gordie convinces his friends to go off with him traipsing through the woods for some days, digging for a legendary treasure he just heard about. Things are tense enough for as long as these guys believe to be alone in the woods, but once they encounter company, and a potentially dangerous situation, things devolve quickly.

For my tastes, David McCracken’s Bullitt County is a pretty excellent example of how to make a clever, emotionally complex indie genre movie. It’s a film that at first seems a bit too interested in going for one wild stylistic flourish or the other, but what at first feels like the director showing off a little really turn out to be good, creative and meaningful directorial decisions meant to strengthen the naturalistic portrayal of character relationships and mental states through non naturalistic stylistic choices. Which sounds paradoxical but works wonders in practice.

McCracken’s never using his stylistic adventurousness to obfuscate what his actors – and himself as an actor – are doing. Instead, he’s emphasizing a couple of wonderful, nuanced performances by the cast, digging into the complexities of undead friendships, secret loathing and self-loathing, guilt, and what happens when the things we never speak about are being spoken about, much deeper than the film’s beginning made me expect.

I’m not, however, terribly convinced by the decision to set the film in the late 70s. Sure, the fashion works, and there are few enough locations to make these feel semi-authentic, too, but neither the way the characters talk to each other, nor how they relate, nor the way the film sees and portrays them, really seems native to any other era than the late 2010s. At first, that’s the sort of thing to raise my eyebrows, but the longer the film went on, the less I cared about this feeling, for the character work was much too strong when taken on its own terms for the film’s time period to matter in the end. Even philosophically, the film is not terribly close to 70s thriller nihilism. This is, after all, a film where the final character is rewarded for a morally (and ethically) correct decision, instead of dying like everyone else, which is pretty much the opposite of everything the cinema of the 70s taught me about life. It’s not a fake or cheesy moral, mind you, but something that works organically as part of the film.

Speaking of organically, the film even manages to contain a couple of plot twists that not annoy me to bits. Both of them are the kind of twists that are not just actual parts of the film but part of the meaning of the film, so we are not talking of deus ex machina or horror movie bullshit endings here. Why, even realizing what these twists will be before they come as I did doesn’t work against the film at all.


As a thriller, Bullitt County is a bit eccentrically paced, but this never feels like McCracken not knowing what to do with the genre, rather like the only way the film’s kind of emphasis on characters will work inside of the structures of this genre. Classically styled and effective suspense scenes are still coming during the course of the movie, an audience only needs to be willing to engage with the things that lead up to them properly. And meeting a film on its own terms is always the thing to do; even more so when it’s as good on them as Bullitt County turns out to be.