Jeremy Saulnier’s American Carnage

by Corey Atad

A man has just been shot in the head. From a good distance by some kind of sniper rifle. A stunned Dwight Evans (Macon Blair) struggles to collect himself. Despite having already killed a man with a knife in bloody, intimate fashion, Dwight can’t quite comprehend the nature of what he’s just witnessed, though it spared him his life. “That’s his head,” he says in his state of shock, to which his saviour, the sniper, responds in a casual but grave tone, “That’s what bullets do.” Collecting the body, Dwight continues in a daze. What to do with the other parts of the man’s head? The violence he’s unleashed has upended any theoretical notions of vengeance that have lived in his mind and his heart for decades. What he’s left with is brain matter and bits of skull strewn across the grass, as though seeding the landscape, and a dawning realization that the sowing is far from over.

2013’s Blue Ruin was writer-director Jeremy Saulnier’s breakout feature, though not his first. He and Blair had come up together, making movies as kids, and eventually getting their shit together enough to make the 2007 horror comedy Murder Party. Shot on the pretty crappy digital video of the era, the film is about a guy kidnapped by a group of art school freaks on Halloween, who are making a project out of torturing and killing someone for the sake of a grant application. Its satire is broad, its commentary facile, and it eventually wears out its running time, but its violence is at first genuinely startling before taking a turn for the gorily goofy.