Thursday 20 November: Blue Ruin (15)

USA – Revenge Thriller – Year: 2013 – Running time: 90 mins

Audience feedback: Rating: (3.53 / 5 from 17 responses)

‘Excellent’: 5 votes
‘Very Good’: 5 votes
‘Good’: 2 votes
‘Satisfactory’: 1 vote
‘Poor’: 4 votes

Pared to the bone, this brooding and bloody thriller, reminiscent of Blood Simple with a steelier underbelly, is full of suspense, barely a word spoken in the first twenty minutes, as we are sucked into a mystery: what terrible event led to a sympathetic man living in his titular ‘blue ruin’ of a rust bucket car? Dwight (Macon Blair) is cunning but inept as he tries to exact revenge for a past wrong, aided by his gun-nut, but totally law-respecting, friend Ben (Devin Ratray). With an ironic twist at the end.