User:Tinab2c

If you've seen any of the trailers for Red, White & Blue, the new film from The Living and the Dead director Simon Rumley, chances are good you have these expectations. If you do, promptly throw them out the window. Yes, Rumley's gritty-looking film is low budget, but it bears none of the low-budget trappings that destroy films crafted by lesser talents. It is not spiteful; it is not hateful; but it is beautiful in a supremely unnerving, macabre way. Red, White & Blue does not just get under your skin, it flays it from your very bones.

Rumley opens with a candid introduction to Erica (Amanda Fuller), an emotional Bedouin who spends her night wandering from bar to bar so that she can then wander into and immediately back out of the beds of the countless men taken in by her come hither stare and overt sexuality. And even though, by all measures, she is a morally bankrupt character, little hints and winks at the vulnerable, dying-to-be-loved girl inside her endear the audience towards her situation. Against all instinct we, like her off-kilter neighbor Nate (Noah Taylor), begin to care for a character who clearly does not care what happens to her. What makes the film standout all the more is not the fact that moments in it had me literally chewing on whatever was around me as a coping mechanism, but that Rumley does it all with ear-to-ear professionalism, smiling at you while destroying you. He has assembled a cast and crew that really take the task at hand to heart. Everyone involved cares about elevating these roles beyond the typically one-dimensional characters one finds in horror movies of this ilk. Particularly Amanda Fuller and Noah Taylor, two actors who rise to the task of externalizing emotions and thoughts that are entirely internal in nature. The never judgmental camera is their cohort, always ready to capture their swirling feelings whether they're saying anything or not.

And those swirling feelings are what I admire most about Red, White & Blue. Rumley brokers investment in the characters quickly and effortlessly, never asking the viewer to follow along leaps in logic that exist purely for dramatic affect. And it's not just the main leads, either. You begin to care for the side characters who have made poor but not unforgivable decisions that have found them caught up in the tornado that is Nate. You begin to care for so many different elements on the screen that every snuffed-out flame is felt. Every protesting scream and resistant squirm takes on new weight and the collective gravity of everyone's actions eventually drags it all down, leaving you as an observer feeling physically winded in the aftermath of the crash. If you watch a lot of horror movies, particularly in the last few years, you have no doubt grown accustomed to the expectation that low budget horror movies are emotionally vacant, supplanting plot and character nuance for needless gore and brutality.