Assassination Nation

Every now and then a film is released that manages to encapsulate the spirit of the times. Night Of The Living Dead, Menace II Society, Coming Home, Shaft, The Graduate, Kids, Repo Man, The Hate U Give and many others. Films that either faced the problems of the time head on or took an allegorical view of things. Assassination Nation faces things head on. With a shotgun in one hand and a samurai sword in the other.

Lily, Bex, Sara and Em are 4 BFF's living life in the American as apple pie town of Salem. Lily's boyfriend is a manipulative dick and she's seeing an older man in secret. Bex is a transgender girl with a doomed crush on a football player. Teenage drama abounds until one day a hacker starts leaking the contents of people's phones online. Their most personal secrets are spilled for everyone to gloat over. It's not long before tempers start to flare and in typical yankee doodle dandy fashion, things get violent.

I liked this. It's about as subtle as someone driving a lorry up your arse but it's an adrenalised watch that will keep you on edge to it's final horrifying line. You know those comedies that throw so many jokes at the screen that some of them have to stick, this does the same but takes aim at societal issues instead. Toxic masculinity, homophobia, sexism, cultural violence, the patriarchy, mob law, witch-hunts (it's not set in Salem for nothing), bigotry......I could go on but I'd be testing the limits of this paragraph. Nothing is taboo and the film makes no qualms about it's real target. The town of Salem with all it's problems is microcosm of Modern day America. Donald Trump's America. No country for young women. Young women who dare to use instagram and snapchat. The witches of the 21st century.

It's a necessary watch but it's a tough one too. One scene brings to mind the infamous R.Budd Dwyer press conference of the 1980's and a moment of horror in a household bathroom is probably the bloodiest moment you'll see in a mainstream film this year. Yup, it's a mainstream film from a mainstream studio but I'm amazed at some of the direction it took and just how far it pushes itself. It's depiction of sexuality is frank both in how it's depicted and how it's talked about. American films tend to be chaste in terms of sex and gratuitous in their portrayal of violence but director Sam Levinson (son of Barry) goes for broke with both here giving the film a rather European feel. The Euro feeling extends to it's criticism of America too. One moment of a man preparing to lynch someone while framed by two American flags is a brilliantly blunt middle finger to the screen.

It can't all be perfect though. The latter part of the film has an oddly pro-gun stance that seems to stand in contrast with every other criticism and while it feels cathartic and fun you can't help but wonder if there could be a better and less hypocritical way to round things up. That's the problem with a scattergun approach though. Aim at everything and somethings will clash. The other issue is one of characterisation. Lily and Bex are the only 2 characters in the film that get any real screentime, who actually feel like real people instead of cypher's. Em's only characteristic is that she's African American and poor Sara doesn't get anything to do at all. Odessa Young as Lily and Hari Nef as Bex do good work though. Expect to see a lot more of them soon.

"I hate the fuckin' internet." Spoken in desperation by an authority figure when all hell breaks loose. Yes, it's the root cause of a lot of modern day ills but society was broken long before WWW became a thing and phones became an extension of our hands. The movie shows us that we can't blame everything on the net, we have to shoulder some of it ourselves. It will make you think about your own actions both online and off. The image you project of yourself. How our opinions and actions are coloured by it all. How the hive mind is not a good thing. Any film that can make you think about yourself like that has done a good job in my opinion. All this and it fits in the one-take shot of the year too. 

Well worth a watch.