Something to watch tonight: Friday 2 August

I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore (Blair, 2017)

Looking for anoth­er ‘on this day’ entry to post, I am reminded that I reviewed three Netflix movies in one go on RNZ At the Movies back on 2 August 2017. That was naughty of me!

There’s no text for those reviews up on the RNZ web­site but you can listen to them and read along to I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore below:

Lynskey plays Ruth. She’s a nurse aid and she’s depressed. In a very funny mont­age at the begin­ning, we see all the reas­ons she has got to be depressed – you would be too! People are all stu­pid, thought­less, mean, greedy and selfish and, frankly, she’s had enough (except she doesn’t really know what to do about it).

One day she absent-mindedly leaves her back door unlocked and comes home from work to find her house burgled. Her med­ic­a­tion and laptop have gone, but more import­antly so has the fam­ily sil­ver – a cut­lery set left to her by her grand­moth­er. Annoyed and frus­trated at the lack of interest from law enforce­ment, she takes things into her own hands – with help from anoth­er loc­al mis­fit, Tony, played by everyone’s second favour­ite hob­bit, Elijah Wood.

Tony is a heavy met­al lov­ing, Christian, mar­tial arts fan­at­ic and he offers to provide some backup when Ruth dis­cov­ers her laptop’s loc­at­or beacon hasn’t been deactivated.

Retrieving the laptop entails some detect­ive work, per­sua­sion, viol­ence and luck, but the exper­i­ence is so exhil­ar­at­ing that the pair carry on sleuth­ing. They have a clue to the where­abouts of the sil­ver but they don’t real­ise that the thieves are more dan­ger­ous than they could ever have imagined.

The trail leads them to a huge second-hand empori­um where the eld­erly own­er exper­i­ences a little of Mr Wood’s unlikely mar­tial arts and Ms Lynskey suf­fers from the worst broken fin­ger I’ve ever seen on screen. It’s at about this point that you real­ise that I’m Not at Home in This World Anymore might have won the best dra­mat­ic fea­ture prize at Sundance earli­er this year – which is what attrac­ted my atten­tion – but is best-suited to mid­night screen­ings in the Incredibly Strange festival.

This is very mis­an­throp­ic com­edy, with plenty of dumb viol­ence and increas­ing levels of gore. People curse a lot in Netflix films too, I notice. Even in the trail­ers. The film cli­maxes with a shoot-out between the burg­lars, the hap­less vigil­antes and a dodgy law­yer who might have plenty of cash stored in the safe behind his fire­place. I’ll just say blood – and a few oth­er bod­ily flu­ids – are spilt in gen­er­ous volumes.

Elijah Wood renews his acquaint­ance with New Zealand next week as his latest col­lab­or­a­tion with Ant Timpson, Bookworm, opens in cinemas on Thursday the 8^th.

By the way, also in that At the Movies show I fea­tured the satire War Machine (Brad Pitt fight­ing a los­ing battle in Afghanistan) and Director Bong’s wacky futur­ist fable Okja. All three are still on Netflix and I won­der how many people dis­cov­er and watch them.

Where to watch I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore

Worldwide: Streaming on Netflix