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For a director who debuted with a horror comedy that wore its inspirations on the sleeve by titling itself Murder Party, Jeremy Saulnier instead focused his attention – and the rest of his filmography thus far – on the humble thriller.
It might be one of the most popular, well-worn, and heavily trodden genres in all of cinema, but that’s because it’s among the most malleable. There are an infinite number of unique, interesting, subversive, and engaging stories to be told, but as long as they tick a certain number of boxes, the end result can still be quantified as a thriller.
On the surface, Saulnier’s most recent four features – Blue Ruin, Green Room, Hold the Dark, and Rebel Ridge – are archetypal. There’s a revenge story, a backwoods tale of good versus evil, a hunter on a journey of self-discovery, and an action flick. So far, so conventional, but the filmmaker has taken a place among many of his contemporaries by injecting familiar setups with individual flourishes and thematic resonance.
It’s an approach that’s seen Jordan Peele, the Safdie brothers, Sean Baker, the Daniels collective, Robert Eggers, Greta Gerwig, and Ari Aster gain renown as the next generation of singular auteurs; most, if not all, of their movies are familiar in a sense, whether they’re drama, sci-fi, horror, or comedy, but what emerges on the screen is impossible to imagine being made by anyone else.
Take Blue Ruin, for example. At its core, the film is a story about a man who wants to seek revenge against the person who killed his parents. That’s been seen and done a thousand times over, but Saulnier – with the help of leading man and frequent collaborator Macon Blair – makes it feel fresh, urgent, and vibrant.
It’s a dark, bleak, and borderline nihilistic movie at points, but it’s also very funny because Blair’s Dwight is completely unprepared and hopelessly inept at exacting retribution. It’s a vigilante tale as old as time, but it’s all in the execution, with Saulnier recognising the framework’s limitations but using them to his advantage.
Green Room delivered a punk rock exercise in existential dread that reflects the fractious socio-political and racial climate of modern America, with Patrick Stewart in fearsome form as a white supremacist. However, strip it back to its core elements, and it’s not exactly a million miles away from a standard slasher. The protagonists are on unfamiliar turf, being hunted down and eradicated by the antagonists, forcing them into a fight for their lives, which they begin the story completely unprepared for.
Netflix original Hold the Dark is arguably Saulnier’s weakest thriller, but that’s only because the rest are so strong. Jeffrey Wright’s hunter is enlisted to track down and exterminate the wolves responsible for the disappearance of three kids in rural Alaska, which paints the picture of standard survival fare that pits man against both animals and the elements.
Again, that’s fairly accurate, but only to a certain extent. Instead, Hold the Dark flirts with the existential and otherworldly as Wright’s Russell Core confronts the power of grief, the nature of cruelty, and how cycles of violence can prove so difficult to break. Lower-tier Saulnier is still better than most, and his next effort for the streaming service was his most commercial and accessible yet.
Not that Saulnier has sold out or dumbed down for streaming, though, with Rebel Ridge steeped in timely notions of police corruption, prejudice, legal loopholes, and the exploitation of red tape. The plot isn’t a million miles away from Sylvester Stallone’s First Blood, but as much as it makes an easy selling point, it’s hardly doing it justice.
All four are thrillers, but they’re markedly different from each other. That’s Saulnier’s mastery in microcosm; audiences may have seen stories that follow a similar path, but the chances are high they’ve never seen them made quite like this.
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