I Dont Feel at Home in This World Anymore Movie Review

Meryl Streep may opine that mixed martial arts aren't arts at all, merely and then she hadn't still seen what player-turned-managing director Macon Blair and Elijah Forest do with the latter'due south martial-arts-obsessed sidekick graphic symbol in I Don't Feel at Dwelling house in This World Anymore. A delicious combination of idiosyncratic character drama and increasingly violent and violently absurd comedy, this Netflix title opened the U.S. Dramatic Competition at Sundance this year and is an bodacious debut for Blair, the star of Jeremy Saulnier's Bluish Ruin and Light-green Room. It likewise offers New Zealand actress Melanie Lynskey (Heavily Creatures, Happy Christmas) 1 of her juiciest roles to date equally the lead grapheme, a nursing assistant who has lost all organized religion in humanity and and then finds herself chasing after some petty criminals who stole her laptop and heirloom silverware. This good-looking and confidently assembled characteristic will premiere February. 24 on the streaming service.

Lynskey is Ruth, a woman whose life is equally unassuming as her modest home and piece of work. But something snaps when she returns from her piece of work as a caregiver ane evening and finds that someone burgled her house and took off with her computer and grandma'southward silverware. She feels violated, as she inappropriately tells the shocked girl of a friend, and finally decides to go after the thieves herself when an app on her telephone gives her the location of her laptop and the ineffective law refuse to help her.

The Bottom Line A good-looking and well-performed genre bender.

In the early going, the camerawork and the score, the latter by the manager'southward siblings, Brooke and Will Blair, play upward the unease and even the menace that Ruth feels afterwards the break-in, though already there'due south room for some moments of off-color humor as well, notably involving a foul-mouthed lady's last words at Ruth'southward workplace.

To not exist completely alone on her crazy quest to get back her belongings and get fifty-fifty with a globe she doesn't understand anymore, Ruth recruits the unlikeliest of assistants: Tony (Wood), a weirdo neighbour who looks like the beanpole version of John Goodman's character in The Big Lebowski and who has the nasty addiction of letting his dog Kevin shit in Ruth's yard. To perhaps recoup for his wiry frame, Tony has taken a polish to incongruous things, including the same martial arts and heavy metal music, both sources of some of the film's occasionally delightfully eccentric sense of humor.

Ruth has no experience as a detective or a cop and neither does she really have a plan beyond getting her stuff back from the location indicated on her telephone. And Tony doesn't seem to be of much assistance in this area, though he at least has the good grace to turn up at the right time and place more than a few times. The moving-picture show, also written by Blair, manages an impressive balancing act in term of its tricky, quicksilver tone, which constantly oscillates between foreboding, menacing, hilarity and absurdity without ever feeling incongruous. On a purely narrative level, however, the introduction of some of the villains feels somewhat awkward, as the film has to abandon its point-of-view close to Ruth to evidence what kind of people they are before they are set onto a collision course with Ruth and Tony, which doesn't quite feel organic.

Lynskey impresses as a simple gal who'southward fed up with the world she lives in — note the championship — and whose only drive is her instinct to set things right, while Wood adds another memorable oddball creation to his growing gallery of superb supporting turns. ­All of the crooks — because of course it's not just one guy, and so Blair has more than than i potentially disposable body bachelor for his increasingly claret-soaked antics — are played to the hilt by the terrific supporting cast, merely information technology's Christine Woods who steals the show every bit the stepmother of ane of them. She's a perfectly coiffed woman who is either completely gullible or hilariously nonplussed by Ruth and Tony arriving on her doorstep and posing every bit cops with a bluecoat lifted from a bag of cereals. Her one-judgement explanation for her deportment gets one of the pic'south biggest laughs.

Blair's portrayal of the world of drug addicts, lowlifes and the elementary working-class folk that go mixed up in the aftermath of their piffling crimes, is unerring and feels closely related to Saulnier'due south universe. Only the humor, which becomes increasingly cool and violent as the film snowballs into something more outrageous, is distinctly his own, scoring laughs with people getting whacked, shot and accept diverse limbs go through what look like very painful transformations. Though this shift prevents the motion picture from becoming truly touching in the character department, few people are likely to intendance as the laughs and shocking moments keep coming. Again, what impresses is the smoothness of the tonal shifts, combining a menacing crime story with absurdist humour.

Equally a Netflix Original, I Don't Feel at Domicile in This World Anymore wasn't necessarily made with theatrical exhibition in mind, simply this doesn't seem to have impacted the moving-picture show's craft credits, which are superb. Director of photography Larkin Seiple (Swiss Army Man) uses a lot of contre-jour and low-sun shots that give the frequently unsavory proceedings a royal, deceivingly peaceful glow, while the film's versatile score is key in helping to calibrate all of the story's tricky transitions in mood and temper. The soundscape, too, is a major plus in ensuring every punch and whack lands with the appropriate force.

Finally, Blair himself has a fun cameo early on on equally a bar patron who ruins the plot of a fantasy novel that Ruth has started reading. The scene almost plays similar a warning: This film volition exist much better if you lot don't know what'south going to happen going in.

Venue: Sundance Film Festival (U.South. Dramatic Competition)
Production companies: Netflix, XYZ, Filmscience
Bandage: Melanie Lynskey, Elijah Wood, David Yow, Jane Levy, Devon Graye, Christine Woods, Robert Longstreet, Lee Eddy, Gary Anthony Williams
Author-director: Macon Blair
Producers: Neil Kopp, Vincent Savio, Anish Savjani, Mette-Marie Kongsved
Executive producers: Nick Spicer, Lee Eddy, Matt Levin, Ian Bricke
Director of photography: Larkin Seiple
Production designer: Tyler B. Robinson
Costume designer: Julie Carnahan
Editor: Tom Vengris
Music: Brooke Blair, Will Blair
Casting: Mark Bennett

Not rated, 96 minutes

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Source: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/i-dont-feel-at-home-world-anymore-review-965554/

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