Carnage obscures ‘Nation’s’ message
“Assassination 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-forall 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. Writer-director Sam Levinson shows us the proceedings as an iphone might, creating an atmosphere of casual surveillance. What we see often resembles how social media recapitulates events — filtered and distorted, with subjects who have internalized the idea that their privacy has been sacrificed to terms of service.
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 also has secrets, 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 is not exactly T.S. Eliot, though. Lily gets a few decent monologues about the problems facing women in a time of dangerously mixed messages, but “Assassination Nation’s” journey to empowerment takes a long detour through the kind of leering exploitation it argues against.
There is a repulsive scene, for instance, of Lily having a decisive encounter with her online “daddy,” a flimsy and odious setup to a spasm of score-settling violence. The film means to strike 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. Other story threads disappear without explanation.
National politics get name-checked, and American flags fly over depraved masked-mob carnage, in the glib manner of a “Purge” sequel.
In the end, vengeance dons matching red raincoats and takes up arms, and a stab at militant feminism becomes what may end up as the NRA’S favorite movie of 2018.