I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore (2017)

I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore (2017)

IMDB Rating : 7.0/10(as on 26.03.2017)

When a depressed woman is burglarized, she finds a new sense of purpose by tracking down the thieves alongside her obnoxious neighbor. But they soon find themselves dangerously out of their depth against a pack of degenerate criminals.

Director: Macon Blair

Writer: Macon Blair

Stars: Melanie Lynskey, Chris Doubek, Marilyn Faith Hickey

1h 33min | Comedy, Crime, Drama

IMDB Link Here

Meryl Streep may opine that mixed martial arts aren’t arts at all, but then she hadn’t yet seen what actor-turned-director Macon Blair and Elijah Wood do with the latter’s martial-arts-obsessed sidekick character in I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore

In the early going, the camerawork and the score, the latter by the director’s siblings, Brooke and Will Blair, play up the unease and even the menace that Ruth feels after the burglary, though already there’s room for some moments of off-color humor as well, notably involving a foul-mouthed lady’s last words at Ruth's workplace.

Lynskey impresses as a simple gal who’s fed up with the world she lives in — note the title — and whose only drive is her instinct to set things right, while Wood adds another memorable oddball creation to his growing gallery of superb supporting turns. ­All of the crooks — because of course it’s not just one guy, so Blair has more than one potentially disposable body available for his increasingly blood-soaked antics — are played to the hilt by the terrific supporting cast, but it’s Christine Woods who steals the show as the stepmother of one of them.

Blair’s portrayal of the world of drug addicts, lowlifes and the simple working-class folk that get mixed up in the aftermath of their petty crimes, is unerring and feels closely related to Saulnier’s universe. But the humor, which becomes increasingly absurd and violent as the film snowballs into something more outrageous, is distinctly his own, scoring laughs with people getting whacked, shot and have various limbs go through what look like very painful transformations.

As a Netflix Original, I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore wasn’t necessarily made with theatrical exhibition in mind, but this doesn’t seem to have impacted the film’s craft credits, which are superb. Director of photography Larkin Seiple (Swiss Army Man) uses a lot of contre-jour and low-sun shots that give the frequently unsavory proceedings a majestic, deceivingly peaceful glow, while the film’s versatile score is key in helping to calibrate all of the story’s tricky transitions in mood and atmosphere. The soundscape, too, is a major plus in ensuring every punch and whack lands with the appropriate force.

Finally, Blair himself has a fun cameo early on as a bar patron who ruins the plot of a fantasy novel that Ruth has started reading. The scene almost plays like a warning: This movie will be much better if you don’t know what’s going to happen going in.

Read full review at Hollywood Reporter

Dark, Goofy Neo-Noir

“What do you want?” an exasperated petty criminal asks Ruth Kimke (Melanie Lynskey), who’s in the middle of the strange vigilante rampage at the heart of the new film I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore. Ruth thinks for a second. “For people to not be assholes!” she replies, which feels as good a battle cry as any in these angry, polarized times. Ruth is a fitting anti-hero for 2017: She’s depressed, she’s being taken for granted in her job, and she has no idea where to direct her resentment.

So when it does come spilling out, it has all kinds of unintended consequences, some comical and others decidedly not. The debut film from Macon Blair, I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore is a shambling piece of neo-noir that swerves between gentle indie comedy and horrifying violence with ease—a combination that helped it win this year’s Sundance Film Festival Jury Prize. The movie, released Friday on Netflix, is grounded by Blair’s eye for the gruesome, which he surely picked up working as an actor on projects like Jeremy Saulnier’s gory Green Room. At its best, Blair’s film is like Blood Simple crossed with The Three Stooges—a clever, gritty tale of revenge at its most inept, anchored by performances that brim with goofy fury.

Blair started out as an actor working with his childhood friend Saulnier, the American indie-horror director who expertly deploys very realistic, very shocking scenes of violence in films like Green Room and Blue Ruin. So I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore’s eventual nightmarish turn makes sense, and there’s certainly something to be said for the bloody creativity on display. But as the film goes on, it gets hard to figure out just what kind of a larger point Blair is looking to make. Is Ruth a modern-day Travis Bickle, similarly angry at society but far less adept at resorting to violence? If so, her heart doesn’t really seem to be in it by the time the stakes get truly deadly.

I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore is most effective as a grumpy, shambolic comedy, a weird buddy picture for Lynskey and Wood that sees the former’s character dabbling in brutish selfishness and the latter’s enjoying a rare chance at a normal human friendship. It’s less interesting as a gory slapstick thriller, but the ending is memorable and Blair’s skill at directing action is undeniable. Still, the film perhaps works best of all as an unexpected treatise on the state of American manners in 2017—and as a story in which the real villain is humans’ collective lack of empathy.

Read full review at The Atlantic