I mention that now because Assassination Nation is a film I view as similarly mistaken for cool and edgy, when it is often just desperate and juvenile. It wants to be shocking, clearly, but it's a film that feels tame and out of date already.
Odessa Young is Lily Colson, a young woman living in Salem. She has a boyfriend (Bill Skarsgård), and is also having a lot of fun, to put it one way, with a married man she calls "daddy". Lily starts off as a relieved bystander when a hacker starts to reveal sensitive private information belonging to town residents, but it's not long until she, and most of her friends, becomes a target. Everyone has their secrets, some have more than others. And all of this dirty laundry being washed in public eventually leads to emboldened and angered men becoming abusive, and assholes thinking they should make everything right by punishing those they see as being most immoral and/or causing the situation.
The second feature to be both written and directed by Sam Levinson, Assassination Nation has a few good individual moments. It's just a shame that they are drowned out in the hyperactive mess that makes up the rest of the film. And one of those better moments basically plays out over the end credits. Levinson obviously wants to comment on our modern habits (all of that data that can be out there for every one of us, be it text messages or emails or photos, jumping to the wrong conclusion about something and not listening to reason if it doesn't suit our argument), but he undercuts everything by appearing to run through a checklist of trigger warnings that are provided at the very start of the film. You get a great sequence, for example, of a man trying to explain why pictures of his young daughter in the bath don't make him a pedophile, all while a large crowd is baying for his blood, but you also get a plot point about Lily being fed up with her boyfriend's refusal to go down on her. There's a guy secretly hooking up with someone who is transgender (in scenes that reminded me of Cruel Intentions), the constant threat of being targeted by seemingly-brilliant hackers (see a LOT of movies and TV shows from the past decade, not least of them being Mr. Robot), and an escalation of heated emotions as more and more secrets come out (in scenes that reminded me, oddly enough, of the third act of Needful Things). Assassination Nation is far from original. It's also just a bit silly, certainly by the time it is pushing things even further for the big finale.
Hey, I mistrust the general public, when being coerced into one mass sway of opinion, as much as the next person, but even I couldn't buy into just how quickly things went from 0 to 100 here. The film may be a heightened experience, with everything deliberately ramped up to dangerously excessive levels, but that doesn't make it work any better. I probably would have enjoyed this more as a live piece of theatre, something that really COULD have felt more intense and daring, depending on how uncomfortable the audience was made to feel. As a film, however, it starts to fall apart during the opening scenes.
Young is fine in the role of Colson, and she makes more of an impression than any of her co-stars (with the exception of Hari Nef, and kudos to Levinson for having an actual transgender actress playing someone transgender). Skarsgård adds another toxic male role to his list of them (he does them so well), Colman Domingo is superb in his role as the school principal, and Joel McHale tries, and fails, to overcome the silliness of the script with his performance.
It's made well enough, and the good amongst the bad makes it just about worth your time, but Assassination Nation totally drops the ball. I get what Levinson was aiming for, and there's an argument to be made for the style matching the content, but the most important points are too easily drowned out by the cacophony of irritating excess.
4/10
You can buy the movie here.
Americans can buy it here.
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