I Don't Feel At Home In This World Anymore

 I Don't Feel At Home In This World Anymore opens with barrage of low key, quotidian assholishness heaped on poor Ruth (Melanie Lynskey) by random people. You know the type: people cutting in line,  not picking up their dog poop, littering - not giving a fuck about others and just being generally shitty. The first of these incidents gets the biggest laugh in the movie: a dying woman dies in the middle of a horrible tirade right in front of Ruth at the hospice she works in as a nurse... later, surrounded by her grieving family, she's asked if there were any last words.
 She doesn't have the heart to tell them the last words were "Keep your gigantic monkey dick out of my good pussy."

 Linskey is aways good, but especially so here playing a quiet, decent person who feels increasingly out of step with the rest of humankind.

 When she gets back home after this particularly shitty day, she finds someone's broken in and stolen her laptop, some silver that belonged to a late, favorite family member, and meds. It's a shitty thing to happen to anyone, and Ruth's reaction to it all - a sort of resigned heartbreak mixed with impotent rage -  is spot on and like so much of the rest of the movie, very relatable.

 When the police get there they basically brush her off and give her a hard time for not locking her front door. Cold.

 After stewing over it for a couple of days, Ruth starts sleuthing around and is able to track down some of her missing stuff; So she enlists the aid of one of her neighbours for backup - Tony (Elijah Wood, in a pseudo-mullet with a rattail and a Saxon T-shirt), an introverted weirdo who seems to be less of a dick than everyone else. And off they go, on an initially successful quest across their little Texan suburb to get Ruth's shit back.

 As their crusade goes on, Ruth gets a little too much into it. Not that it turns into a proper vigilante movie or anything - her plan is simply to confront people and maybe get them to, at most, explain themselves. Get them to be at least a little ashamed. But unfortunately for Ruth and Tony, part by skill and part by dumb luck, they do eventually manage to catch the attention of the people that originally robbed her place - a trio of strung-out petty thieves (led by David Yow!) who'd barely register as mooks in your standard vigilante movie, but drip with menace here.

 Writer/Director Macon Blair became known after playing the lead in Blue Ruin, and this, his first movie, is definitely in tune with that film's sensibilities. Describing it as Blue Ruin but played as a comedy is a bit glib, but fair - at least if we're thinking of comedy more in the ancient Greek sense; There are some good jokes here and a pervasive bleak sense of humour, but it's undercut by a nasty intensity, a queasy sense of danger that seems to promise things will not go well. And.. well, they don't. Should anyone make it through alive, you can be sure they'll have earned getting to the finish  line.

 There is some action, and it is suitably brutal, deflating any glamour or the more vicarious thrills this sort of movie might offer. The film doesn't stay pinned on Ruth's viewpoint, either; other characters get a chance to expand on theirs too, and a lot of these make a lot of sense. The script remains sympathetic to Ruth and Tony to the end, but it never completely romanticizes the action or loses sight of how fucked up, dangerous, and just plain stupid some of the stuff they get up to is.

 Some of the events towards the end get a little far-fetched, but it's easy to forgive a little silliness given how grounded most of the movie feels at that point. It's a good one.