Blue Ruin (2013)

Dwight (Macon Blair) lives in his car on a beach in Delaware, until he learns the man who killed his parents 10 years ago is being released from prison. He goes to the prison, where we get a nice play in contrasts between this man living alone in his beat-to-shit Bonneville, with a ratty white-shirt, and a man who murdered two people, who gets picked up by a half-dozen family members in a limo. Dwight follows them to a bar, and clumsily knifes the killer in the bathroom. At which point everything goes wrong.

So it's a movie about revenge and how easily that can get out of control. How it's rarely anything like in action movies, how people don't stop to consider the consequences until after the fact. For all that his life seems to have come to a halt since his parents' death, Dwight's clearly not spent that time making plans. He tried buying a gun, but he lives off the money he makes recycling cans he finds on the beach. He's not getting a gun. He loses his car keys while killing the guy, which he doesn't realize until after he's cut his hand angrily knifing one of the limo's tires, which is too bad since that's the car he has to steal.

Which means his car got left behind. Which means the family knows who killed the guy. Which means his sister and her kids are in danger. Which means Dwight has to fix this, somehow.

Before and after, he walks around in kind of a wide-eyed daze. There's no urgency, but also nothing measured in his movements. He'll start towards one idea, then abandon it mid-stride for something else. Grab a pitchfork for lack of better weapons, then set it aside and decide to try and sneak out of the house and steal his car back instead. Hit a guy with the car, then go back and forth between throwing the guy in his trunk and taking the guy's gun. Which gets him an arrow in the leg. It could, in a different framing, be played for laughs, but here it shows how unprepared he is.

The camera angles sometimes so that the light flares in the lens and obscures him entirely from us, in the same way the voices of other characters often become indistinct as Dwight gets lost in his own thoughts. Everyone else we see has moved on with their own lives in one way or another, even if, like his sister, they still harbor some anger. He bailed on his friends without a word, and they grew up, got jobs. Now Dwight's just blown in and started all this, and they have to deal with it.

And Dwight knows this. Blair is soft-spoken, unsure, awkward and apologetic with everyone. Whether he's actually sorry I'm less sure of. He does seem willing to die if that would just end this thing (though that might be a death wish on his part), but he knows there won't be any guarantee the killer's family will leave it there. So where's that leave him? Ruining someone else's life like his once was, apparently.