Thriller
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Jeremy Saulnier directs a corrupt cop thriller that isn’t as dry as hoped, but is sharp and politically subtle enough to stand out from the rest.
A man rides his bike to a small town in northern Louisiana, armed with a sum of cash intended to pay bail for his cousin, who is incarcerated for a minor offense of possession of weed. The heavy metal rumbling in his headphones prevents him from reacting to the sirens of the police car tailgating him. A muscular check ensues during which Terry, whose skin color does not allow him to be insubordinate, sees his wad of money fly away under dubious protocol justifications, barely hiding the ambient dirty tricks. The cousin awaits an imminent transfer to a state prison where his past testimonies against a mobster promise him a dire fate: if he wants to save him, Terry has only a few days, or even a few hours, to recover his money, dismantle local corruption, attack him by force, or more likely a mixture of all of these.
Sub-Rambo placid
The improbable “metal mix” (Iron Maiden, Bad Brains) that saturates his ears is not just a detail: a way of gently reawakening the precepts of Jeremy Saulnier’s previous film, the scathing Green Room, rural slasher opposing a hardcore band on tour to a gang of Oregonian skinheads. This one already opened with the breaking and entering of a punk sample in a small stronghold in the American depths. A way, in both films, to oppose the symbolic violence of a music
