My streaming gem: why you should watch I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
2020 has been a long nightmare of a year, one that has constantly defied the rules of time and space in terms of how much bad stuff can happen in such a short amount of time. The cascade of awfulness never seems to end. Amid all this chaos, the responsibilities of adulthood – work, chores, bills – feel insurmountable, and the world around us feels unrecognizable. One of the only things getting me through it is cinema, and the movie I keep returning to for its insightful portrait of this pervasive malaise and our simmering resentment in response to it is Macon Blair’s directorial debut, I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore.
Blair has long been known for his collaborations with childhood friendturned-creative partner Jeremy Saulnier. He played a supporting role in Saulnier’s directorial debut, the horror comedy Murder Party. Blair then starred in (and produced) Saulnier’s Blue Ruin as a man avenging his parents’ murders and being drawn into an interfamilial war, and next appeared as a secondary villain in Saulnier’s followup, the brutal neo-Nazi horror Green Room. Its success helped pave the way for the duo’s next collaboration, Hold the Dark; Saulnier directed and Blair wrote the screenplay for an adaptation of William Giraldi’s unsettling novel about cosmic evil in an Alaskan village. Any familiarity with Saulnier and Blair’s films provides a clue into their shared sensibilities and common interests: people living in the margins of society, pushing back against increasingly brutal circumstances to survive.
Blair picks up that same thread in I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore, a film that steps slightly back from the grandiosity of Blue Ruin, the griminess of Green Room, and the disquiet of Hold the Dark to focus more on the everyday indignities that hint at society-wide selfishness. (Blair took the film’s title from a Woody Guthrie song about the anger of Dust Bowl refugees after the Great Depression.) Set in Austin, Texas, it follows nursing assistant Ruth (Melanie Lynskey) during a particularly nightmarish few days. The opening scene, in which Ruth’s plaintive stargazing is interrupted by the rowdiness of her neighbors, briskly communicates her frustration with other people’s self-regard. The following morning while she drives to work, the colossal truck in front of her blasts out diesel exhaust. The pa