Blue Ruin

In Virginia family feuds bleed on and on, a cartoon noir of Family Values run amok. The twist in writer/photographer/director Jeremy Saulnier’s astonishing debut, Blue Ruin, is that this three-generation feud is in the modern now, not some balladeer’s mythic past. There is a theme song, though: “No Regrets.” The singer has no regrets for the life he has led. 

Hero Dwight (Macon Blair) is not without regrets when he kills the ex-con imprisoned for murdering Dwight’s parents, then has to snuff the guy’s four sibs. Dwight wishes the vengeance would just end. But he has to kill the enemy’s brothers and sisters to save his own sister.

Dwight just wants to come clean. We first see him stealing a bath in a stranger’s unattended home. Then after his first kill he cleans up entirely, changing the shaggy homeless look for the nerdiest looking action hero ever. As ‘Dwight’ contains ‘white’ he embodies a driving need for purity. Initially he thinks that means he has to kill the convict who has just been released from jail. That done, he’s driven on by his certainty of that man’s family’s drive for vengeance. 

It doesn’t matter that the feud is based on a lie. The convict didn’t kill Dwight’s parents. His daddy did, because his wife was having an affair with Dwight’s dad. When the original killer’s grandson finishes Dwight off there’s no-one left to extend the feud. Dwight’s enigmatic last words — “The keys are in the car” — are his blessing for the boy to escape and start life free of the family feud.

Early and late the film pauses for a montage of images of domestic stasis. In empty rooms there is a stillness and calm the people will explode. The montages connect to the album of family photos Dwight flips through, as he regretfully waits for his last three victims to come home to him. He may get over his regrets at having to kill them. But he assuredly has no regrets when he finally gets to die in the mortal domestic war he inherited. Then finally the heat’s off.