WHOA, TRIGGERS!
New action film a sophomoric modern morality tale that appears to be on crack
Last year, The Circle presented a modern morality tale about how far things could go south if everyone shared all their data all the time. It was mildly thoughtful and rather dull.
Assassination Nation is The Circle on crack. It opens with a shotgun blast of “trigger warnings” — guns, bullying, abuse, blood, drinking, death, drug use, sexual content, toxic masculinity, kidnapping, murder, swearing, torture, weapons, violence, gore, homophobia, transphobia, classism, nationalism, racism, sexism and the male gaze. And it spends the next 100 minutes making good on that list. Or, depending on how strong your stomach is, making bad on it.
Writer/director Sam Levinson’s sophomore (and somewhat sophomoric), feature is set in a small town called Salem — it
doesn’t specify which one, but we’re meant to recall the witchy one. The teenage population is normal, which is to say oversexed, over-sharing and Krazy Glued to their phones.
Lily Colson (Odessa Young), will act as narrator and voice of reason through the mayhem to follow, though she’s hardly a paragon: Although she’s dating Mark (Bill Skarsgård), she’s also carrying on via text message with an older guy who is listed in her contacts as “Daddy.” Yuck.
Small-town civility cracks like an egg when a hacker releases information that the mayor — who, though in public is no friend of the non-cis community — is in private a part of it. The populace calls for blood, and soon gets it.
Next, Principal Turrell (Colman Domingo), is outed on the more dubious charge of having taken “pornographic” pictures of his six-year-old daughter in the bath. (Lily reminds her parents that they have a nude photo of her, aged two, on their mantel.) The crowd turns its ire on the principal, the message being that once a mob is calling to lock someone up, it’s relatively easy to set them on a new target.
Lily and her best friends (Suki Waterhouse, newcomer Abra and transgender actress Hari Nef ), are at first spectators on the sidelines. As a week passes, more personal details are leaked and the town begins to resemble The Purge as remade by Quentin Tarantino.
But when Lily is falsely accused of being the source of the hack, she and her pals are forced to take arms against a sea of troubles, at which point the film sets aside its moral compass and becomes a full-on revenge drama. It’s a self-aware one at that, as the protagonists discuss their lives in terms of movies, including why no one has remade Straw Dogs with Dustin Hoffman as the rape victim.
Oddly, this is where the film’s shooting style (I’m talking cameras, not guns), settles down a little. Early scenes play like a sizzle reel of editing tricks, full of slow motion, split screens and sick beats. Contrast that to the scene later in the film where a home invasion is shot in a single take from the windows outside the home in question. It’s a deliriously well-made segment.
That said, Assassination Nation manages to wear out its welcome, its over-the-top violence flirting with becoming a parody of its own best intentions. Though that didn’t stop it taking third place for People’s Choice at the recent Toronto festival’s Midnight Madness program, albeit from only 10 entries.
There’s a message here about the evils of social media and the tendency of modern society to polarize faster than a pair of 3D glasses. But I would have preferred if the movie had included fewer triggers and more warnings.