Before Rebel Ridge, Jeremy Saulnier Perfected His Style with Blue Ruin

After five years, multiple COVID-responsible delays, and a major recasting, Rebel Ridge is finally here. Director Jeremy Saulnier, who broke out with action fans in the 2010s (especially after the ultra-brutal Green Room), first conceived of the vigilante thriller Rebel Ridge in 2019, with John Boyega in the lead role, but the COVID pandemic pushed filming back to 2022. When they started filming, John Boyega left partway through production, allegedly for family reasons. Even after it wrapped, its fate looked uncertain, reportedly spending two years in post-production before Netflix abruptly announced its streaming-exclusive release this summer.

While Saulnier has yet to truly break out into the mainstream, he’s beloved in cult circles for his nuts-and-bolts storytelling, unbearable suspense, and brutal violence. Thus far, Rebel Ridge looks to be another worthy addition to his canon. And yet Saulnier’s crowning achievement might still remain his 2014 breakout, Blue Ruin, which infused a classic story of revenge with his already fully formed voice.

What Is Blue Ruin About?

Blue Ruin revolves around Dwight Evans (Macon Blair, who later directed the still-unreleased Toxic Avenger reboot), a drifter who lives out of his car. Upon hearing that Wade Cleland, the man imprisoned for murdering his parents, is being released from jail, Dwight returns to his Virginia hometown, hell-bent on revenge. In fact, he actually gets his revenge early on — Wade’s murder proves the story’s true inciting incident.

As is typical in Saulnier’s work, the problems pile up from here. Having dropped his own car keys, Dwight is forced to flee in a getaway car, and Wade’s sadistic family members quickly find out who their brother’s killer is after tracking his car registration. Worse, it’s registered at the address of his sister Sam, forcing Dwight to now protect both himself and his remaining family. In escaping an attack from Wade’s brothers, Dwight accidentally runs over one of them, forcing him to stow him in the trunk.

Believe it or not, things only continue to escalate from here as Dwight recruits his old high school friend, Ben, for further assistance. As they interrogate Wade’s brother, Teddy, it becomes clear that the circumstances surrounding the deaths of Dwight’s parents may not be as they seemed. This leads to a thundering climax between Dwight and the rest of Wade’s family, illustrating the futility of revenge and how its cyclical nature threatens to consume everything in its path and possibly claim the lives of more innocents.

This setup might sound simple, but like with Saulnier’s other movies, the genius is in the execution. He wisely keeps the plot boiled down to its absolute essentials, with virtually no filler scenes to be found. While he also keeps character development sparse, he still manages to generate viewer empathy out of the hope that they will manage to survive. Most importantly, Saulnier treats his audience with respect; his heroes and villains alike all react in believable and human ways, and as such, the movie feels like a cat-and-mouse game as he brings the suspense to a breaking point.

Blue Ruin Is Brilliantly Directed and Subversive

To start with the obvious, Blue Ruin is an impeccably made film. There’s a reason Jeremy Saulnier almost immediately became a name to watch upon its release, as with only the second film in his career, he displays a fully formed voice and confidence behind the camera (even more impressively considering it cost less than half a million). The minimalist cinematography captures everything we need to see without drawing attention to itself, never overstaying its welcome and always serving the story. Meanwhile, the sound design is utilized nearly flawlessly; Saulnier keeps things quiet for much of the runtime, lulling us into a sense of security before jolting us with sudden bursts of violence.

But it’s the pacing that truly makes Blue Ruin sing. With a runtime of just under two hours, Saulnier makes sure to never waste a moment. Every scene advances the plot in some way; things escalate until an explosion of violence in the climax, and the film ends the second it needs to, not once overstaying its welcome. What’s even more impressive is how much of this is accomplished without dialogue, as there are vast stretches of the story where almost no one speaks, and it displays the talent of Saulnier and lead actor Macon Blair that they’re still able to tell us everything we need to know.

In a genre as crowded as the revenge film, Blue Ruin could’ve potentially fallen into a number of moral pitfalls or risked feeling indistinguishable from the likes of the Taken franchise. Instead, it proves itself memorable in how thoroughly it deconstructs the vigilante thriller, making it possibly the most sneakily subversive work in the genre since 2011’s brilliant Drive. Dwight Evans isn’t the type of unstoppable action hero you’d expect from Liam Neeson or Keanu Reeves nowadays; he’s a regular guy, unequipped for his daunting task ahead and clearly in over his head.

It’s key that Saulnier lets Dwight kill Wade so early in the runtime. While he never sugarcoats the shockingly brutal violence in his action scenes, he’s less interested in the journey to revenge than the unexpected repercussions that come from fulfilling it. Dwight’s reckless actions set Wade’s entire family on his trail and inadvertently put his own sister in danger, illustrating how a clean getaway from revenge is impossible. Saulnier further emphasizes how futile it is with the revelation that Wade might not have even killed his parents in the first place.

Blue Ruin Was a Deserved Breakout for Jeremy Saulnier

Watching Blue Ruin, there’s no wonder that Jeremy Saulnier almost immediately became hyped up as the next exciting filmmaker among action fans. With only his second feature film, he already displayed a clear grasp of tone, craft, and genre, and it was clear that he had a promising career ahead of them. The ultra-tense Green Room only vindicated these feelings, and while we’ve had to wait a while for him to return, we couldn’t be more excited that he’s finally back with Rebel Ridge, especially since its reviews are among the best of the year. Blue Ruin is streaming on Tubi and Amazon FreeVee. Rebel Ridge is streaming on Netflix.