Usually, as the saying goes, revenge is a dish best served cold. In Blue Ruin, Jeremy Saulnier's low budget thriller, it's served up as an incompetent mess in which everything which could go wrong does go wrong. Starring Macon Blair as Dwight Evans, a man seeking revenge for the killing of his parents, it takes the revenge thriller concept and effectively turns it on its head. Blue Ruin's effectively lies in its willingness to do away with genre tropes and defy audience expectations - Dwight's well-intentioned yet at the same time completely misguided attempt to deliver retribution drives the narrative along while providing more twists and turns than a rollercoaster. In a sense, his incompetence combined with his ignorance as to the true nature of the events which led up to this point transforms Blue Ruin into something of an anti-revenge thriller. It's sometimes grim viewing, but there's an underlying humanity which offsets the bloodbaths with an undertow of poignancy.
