‘Assassination Nation’

ssassination Nation” peaks early, with a funny prologue full of helpful trigger warnings about impending sex, violence, racism, and threats to the “fragile male ego.”

It accurately heralds the anarchy to follow, a “Heathers” meets “The Purge” meets Russ Meyer free-for-all that takes elements of the Salem witch trials and transposes them to the age of the internet. That's a lot to take on, and there are diminishing returns by the time the movie reaches its bloody conclusion.

The film takes place in a town called Salem (palm trees suggest it's not New England) where a quartet of 18-year-old female friends attend school by day and hedonistic parties by night.

But secrets do persist. Lily (Odessa Young) gets sexts from a person named “daddy,” and responds with titillating selfies. Her friend Bex (Hari Neff ), a young trans woman, is hooking up with an in-the-closet football star. The town mayor has secrets too, and so may the high school principal. All are revealed when a hacker siphons up the town's digital secrets and posts them online. There is an eruption of paranoia and anger, and the four young women become the focus of the town's rage and wrath.

There's a barely circumstantial logic to this, but that's part of Levinson's point. The town's anger needs an outlet and a target, and young women are just as likely to be irrationally/conveniently singled out today as they were hundreds of years ago, in that other Salem.

Levinson, though, is not exactly T.S. Eliot.

The film means to strikes a blow for women, but there must be a way to do that without the spectacle of one girl bashing another girl's head with a baseball bat.