Film Review: Vengeance is an enjoyably subversive reappraisal of life in Red State America

Vengeance starts out as a black comedy about cultural misunderstandings but gradually evolves into a more ambitious piece

Director and Writer BJ Novak leads an all-star cast including Boyd Holbrook, Dove Cameron, Issa Rae, and Ashton Kutcher in the comic thriller Vengeance.

Vengeance 

★★★★☆

Summoned to Texas for the funeral of his ex-girlfriend, Abby (Lio Tipton), New Yorker Ben (BJ Novak) is initially horrified when her gun-toting brother Ty (Boyd Holbrook) says he’s seeking Vengeance (15A) for her murder. No self-respecting writer and aspiring podcaster would let an opportunity like that slip away, however, and soon Ben is quietly recording the grief, turmoil and conspiracy theories of Abby’s family as ‘an existential crime story’.

Written and directed by Novak, Vengeance starts out as a black comedy about cultural misunderstandings — the sophisticated city slicker adrift in a Texas wasteland sparsely populated by backward hicks — but gradually evolves into a more ambitious piece that seems to diagnose America’s opiate epidemic as a nation self- medicating against the pain of its irreconcilable differences.

Novak is in good form here as the insincere, vacuous New Yorker fuelled by self-regard, and there’s strong support from Boyd Holbrook, J Smith-Cameron as Abby’s grieving mother, and Ashton Kutcher as a Texas record producer svengali resplendent in rose-decorated white suits and matching Stetson.

The script gets a bit preachy in the final stages, losing its satirical bite in the process, but for the most part Vengeance is an enjoyably subversive reappraisal of life in Red State America.

(cinema release)